*I wrote this in 2013 or ’14. Thanks for reading!
My dad loved porn. The fact that I know this, and that I offered to get him an adult flick during the last months of his life, horrifies a few people I know, even a few of my friends. They were a little shocked that it was okay by me that he had skin mags, adult DVDs, and even a calendar that for years hung in his garage featuring a nineteen fifties style pin-up. Puh-leeze. I was glad he loved women and sex, although, sure, I didn’t want the details. Occasionally he would step over the line, stage whispering to me that so and so who just passed him, going out the door of the coffee shop where we were having lunch, had ‘a nice rack’. He was an appreciator of ‘feminine pulchritude’, a phrase he intoned like a slightly stoned Jonathan Winters, the curvier the better.
I was proud to have a red blooded male for a dad and when, subsequently, two of my close friends discovered that their fathers were gay (one found an extensive pile of man on man porn – and more – in her father’s desk a few months after her mom’s death), I had to chuckle, to myself, laughing at and with the reality of this absolute fact: our parent’s have sex lives and sometimes, sometimes, their sex lives are not quite what we thought or what they, our parents, represented to us. Who knew Francis was gay? Francis who adored my best friend’s mother? Well, I did have an inkling, having run into him once on the upper east side, dressed in a three-piece linen suit in the full heat of a New York summer, complete with a white straw hat, very Quentin Crisp-like. The entire effect gave me pause, but he was her dad, it’s her problem, if it is a problem at all. And I have always contended that the only person whose sex life should and does interest me is ME. At the time of this brief encounter I was, I think, enjoying (not) an unfortunate dry spell in that department and I was not happy about it. Judge not, lest ye be judged or worse yet, judge not lest ye be cursed with an even longer dry spell – heaven forbid!
My mother liked to pronounce upon hers and my dad’s virginity at the time of their marriage, in 1955. This was the only way to be, she trilled, to meet on the playing fields of love (a.k.a. the bed sheets) as equals, innocent equals. Their subsequent marriage, one that was famous among friends and family for its happiness (they laughed a lot together), was given weight and purchase – a foundation – that was entirely based upon this pure and especially blessed beginning. From such beginnings as this, how could a relationship fail to thrive? This was the gold standard.
I was so sold on this idea, this image, that the first few times I had sex (okay, the first dozen times) I was deeply in denial about doing so. After all, like my mom, I was saving myself for marriage! I’d made that promise to myself when I was nine and I meant to keep it, along with ten or so other vows undertaken before puberty, all meant to protect me, perhaps, from the exigencies of that turbulent time (adolescence). My desire to adhere to the ideal was so intense that I did not use birth control those first few dozen times; why would I? I wasn’t having sex, not really, I was falling – always, always drunk – into bed and falling, too, off the false pedestal I’d so wanted to stay on. When I found out I was, twice, pregnant, you could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. How could this be? I wasn’t having sex, I wasn’t, I really wasn’t – oh wait, yes, yes I was. Shit. How could this happen?
I think my dad knew I was pregnant before I figured it out myself. I remember calling them to complain of the 24 hour virus I’d caught that had lasted three weeks now, making me puke every time I did, well, anything! ‘Do you think I need an antibiotic, dad?’ ‘I think what you needed you already missed by a mile, kid!’ ‘Huh?’ ‘Never mind. Good luck to ya.’ And when the sickness went away (I had abortions on both occasions, in my early twenties, literally dancing down Second Avenue after each one), and I visited them for the first time, he did not, unlike my mother, inquire into what meds I had taken or what, exactly, my doctor had told me was wrong. Pops merely looked at me from the corner of his eyes and kept his mouth shut – but I knew that he knew. He had my number as I had his; I was and am a chip off the old block and while I don’t loooove porn, I do appreciate a hot man of any age and suspect I always will.
I got my act together after that, at least where birth control was concerned, although once I had abortion number two I refused to even look at a penis for about two years, imagining that doing so would immediately knock me up once again. If you have ever been sick, throwing up, for a day or two imagine being sick like that for six or eight weeks. Morning sickness my ass. I was sick all day long, waking to puke in the middle of the night, with a completely empty stomach. No sex, especially the mediocre drunk and therefore irresponsible sex I was having back then, was worth that. And as for the trauma of abortion, not this girl. Abortion saved me and yes, I thank God for it pretty much every day.
After my mother died, my dad and I were talking about who knows what – their grandchildren, perhaps – and I believe he made a crack about one of his five granddaughters ‘living in sin’ out in California with her boyfriend of many years. He said this jokingly as my mother was the one who thrillingly pronounced those kinds of things, ‘living in sin’ ‘fallen woman’ ‘why buy the cow’ etc., etc.; she was, always, a good Catholic and good girl, period. I replied by saying that not everyone these days (case in point – me, dad) could do what they, my mom and dad, had done, remain virgins until they married. “I never said that’ WHAT?!! And he repeated ‘I never said that’ but this time he was openly grinning. Are you telling me that you weren’t a virgin? Is that what you’re telling me? ‘Yup and thank goodness one of us knew what we were doing on our honeymoon!’ I had to laugh. Yet another myth exploded, and yet another example of how he knew to keep his mouth shut to make my mother happy, although for my own sake, I wish I had known. I just might have used birth control, I just might have felt better about ‘losing it’ before marriage, getting ‘in the know’.
And so those final months before his death, when he was housebound, on oxygen 24/7 and too proud to go out in public dragging the portable tank, including to the video store to get some porn flicks. I told him if he wanted one, a skin flick, I would get it for him, no problem, and he looked at me as if I’d lost my nut. But then, a week later, he called me for just that, ‘Porn!’ he said, ‘get me some porn’. I wasn’t able to that night, the night of the call, as I worked late and the video store closed early, but I went to see him and we laughed together at the request; me pretending I was horrified, he relieved, I think, that he could ask me for what he really wanted, be himself, now, finally, at the end. He died the following morning. I found him. I’m glad my dad loved porn. He loved life, women, beer and all sports, especially baseball. He loved me too. Lucky me.