This is the final installment of "A Porn Valley Story." To read the story from the beginning, as well as the introduction, start here. Tomorrow, I'll post the full essay as one post to see if it induces reader psychosis.
A PORN VALLEY STORY: PART FOUR
This is the story, the true story, the real story. I went to Porn Valley because I could. I'd have to say that's why I did it. Because it was there, because there was nowhere else that wasn't everywhere, because it was everything I wasn't. I grew up in a house wallpapered in books, under the tutelage of two parents who spent their lives inside heads filled with words but could never say what they really meant, in a city of freaks, Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the feminist movement. Ironic, isn't it? I was born a girl, the problem with No Name having found its way inside me, dictating I would be its progeny. My father was a god, my mother was a monster, and I was their daughter. I grew up tall, like a skyscraper, six-foot-two on the outside, fifty feet tall on the inside. They told me I could do whatever I wanted. So, I did.
When my father left my childhood home, my heart shattered. When he left me a second time, it was his heart that exploded. When I went to Porn Valley, I was going into the heart of what I had never been able to understand, to find out what had stood between my father and me, to see what had stopped me from feeling alive after he died, to unearth what had been kept me from my damned heart beating somewhere in Porn Valley. I said it wasn't about sex, I said it wasn't about pornography, I said it was about something else entirely. I lied. It was a car crash from which I could not look away, it was the Super Bowl-sized circle jerk that blew my mind, it was this thing no words can describe. Jesus Christ, they were amazing. My God, they were fascinating. Dear Lord, they were breathtaking. All those bodies, all those positions, all those scenes. All that moaning, all that groaning, all that caterwauling. All the lovemaking, all the making babies, all the making no sense. This was living, this was dying, this was trying. I was its witness, I was its testimony, I was its evidence. I came alive there, I became a woman there, I turned into a writer there.
I was the child of a man who wrote a book about a dead man in a failed attempt to resuscitate him, I was the child of a woman who failed to write a book about a woman who was already dead and didn't know it, I was the child born with writer's block who, for years and years, failed to write to save her own damn life. Porn Valley was Babylon, the mother of whores and the earth's abominations, and there they all were, living inside it, telling me their stories, telling me this story, telling me my story. The story I saw there was the truth, and, no lie, it was a story that was alive. I was a girl, a woman, a human being, who knew what they were doing--fucking, screwing, X-rated movies is what they were making--who sought of her own volition the most extreme things they were creating, who did the last thing her father would ever do so she could do the one thing her father could no longer do: stay alive, keep on breathing, forever writing.
So, I sit, in this front row seat at the same table where I once sat as a child across from my father, in a pink shotgun near a bend in the train tracks where, at night, I can hear the steel wheels grinding against the rails, less than a block from a river bigger than any I'd seen before. In 2003, I left Porn Valley. Today I live all the way across the country, as far away as I could think of from that land, in a city where there is no valley.
Someday, I'd like to say, I want to take my father to this river, gather his massive bulk in my arms, carry him to the banks, and walk into the water, humming a song about a half-crazy woman by the name of Suzanne. I'd lay my father in this bed, and I'd tell him a new story, the story of all the things I never said, the story of what I did and why I did it, the story of my life that will come after, the one I have yet to tell myself. Under the stars, in the middle of the night, at the center of my world, I'd look at my father. I'd see, one last time, his great hands, his proud brow, his towering height, and I'd see, for once, what it was I could not see the night I turned away from him, what it was that led me to see what I could not turn away from. I'd lay my hand on his broken heart, and I'd mend it. I'd lay a kiss on his cheek, and I'd tell him I love him. I'd let my father go, and I'd watch him sink below the surface. I hope I'd see the stars reflected in it, I hope I'd come out of that river, I hope I'd keep on trying to tell the story of my life the only way I know how.
You see, the thing I learned in Porn Valley is that it's not about sex, it's not about pornography, it's about all that's supposed to be. It's the opposite of death, it's what I fled from, it's what was between my father and me all those years. It's about what sex is, it's about that of which pornography is a pornography, it's about what we are always searching for. Maybe it had to be a woman who would tell this kind of story, maybe it had to be me, maybe if I tell this story one more time I'll be able to say it's about love.
This is the end of my Porn Valley story. This is the part where I tell you that mourning is terminable. Where I reveal that that's all over for me. Where I let you know that I've left that world behind me. Only I can't do that. What I'd like to do, if I might, is take your hand in mine and stand together on the front line of Porn Valley. In the middle of this chaos, at the very edge of my personal apocalypse, I would turn to you and ask you why I did this. Could you tell me? It would be the answer to my problems, the ending to this story, the theory that would make sense of everything that came before. If we could stand there, hand in hand, what you might tell me is this.
It was the only thing that made everything better, that made everything else fade, that let me to forget what had happened to me. But we can't do that, can we? If a story is its author's child, as my parents taught me, what I can tell you of this story is this: I am this monster's mother, and this story's monster is me. It may well be that nothing about this story is terminable, that there is no way I can write an ending to it, that I will never be delivered from it.
Or, I could make up an ending for you, where I'm sitting on my back porch in the darkness, and it's as if something has left me, moving away from me in the tall grass, cutting diagonally across the yard, heading for a train in the distance, going somewhere else, and the only thing I could think is, Asperges me.
So, let this story be my testimony, let what I saw be what finally releases me, let all the things I've done that were no one's fault but my own be what delivers me from this. I've got another story I want to tell, a story that's about this story, and inside this story there is something else. If you listen closely, you'll can hear its heart beating.
