I wanted to talk to these boys, to encourage them to make better life choices, to protect them from the readers of this magazine. While I’d spent the last fifteen years growing up, they hadn’t changed at all. I had morphed from Freshman to Man, and they were still too dumb to put on some fucking pants.
As disturbing as it was, there was something reassuring about my epiphany. Seeing Freshmen as a thirty-six-year-old hadn’t been the turn-on I needed at that moment, but it did something even more important for me: It gave me a sneak preview of how it must feel to be a dad. If my kid ever posed for a magazine like that, I’d kill him.
6
The Womb of Steel
Among the many useless topics discussed in high school algebra that nonetheless stuck with me was the subject of imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is what you get when you try to take the square root of a negative, because such a number couldn’t possibly exist. As Drew and I took our place on the waiting list for a surrogate, I learned a new imaginary number: $109,728. That was the estimated cost of having a baby with Rainbow Extensions. For an estimate, it sounded awfully precise. $109,728—or $109,731.46 if you stop for Starbucks.
There were no financing options, no coupons in the Sunday paper, no deals for free delivery. $109,728 was due in full, in advance—or no baby. Drew and I didn’t have trust funds or stock portfolios or access to a ragtag team of professional thieves who could help us pull off some wicked casino heist. What we had was about $40,000 in the bank and a lot of blind optimism. We had originally earmarked that $40,000 for a down payment on a house, a new car, and a future, none of which we would ever have now.
The only other thing we had on our side was time—one year on the surrogate waiting list to amass the small fortune this baby would cost us. Luckily, our finances had taken a sudden unexpected uptick. Drew found a new job that paid him $1,000 more a week, and I got a promotion that grossed me an additional $500. I did the math, and if we put all that money aside, our imaginary number started to look astonishingly plausible. We still had a long way to go, but la la la everything’s going to work out la la la!
One of the benefits of working with a surrogacy agency is that, as long as you can produce the money, they’ll handle how to dispense it. We wouldn’t need to fork over any direct payments to doctors, lawyers, or, God forbid, the surrogate. All we had to do was enjoy the wonder of creating life while S’mantha handled the icky financial stuff.
The problem was that we couldn’t get S’mantha on the phone. The results from the sperm analysis were supposed to come in on a Tuesday, and she promised to call us the minute she had them in hand. We waited all day, but we never heard from her. On Wednesday morning, we left her a voice mail. We tried again on Thursday and Friday. We sent emails, but we never heard back. This was the woman we were going to entrust a six-figure sum to?
“Rainbow Extensions. How may I direct your call?”
“Hi, this is Jerry Mahoney. I haven’t heard from my caseworker in a week now, and I’m a bit concerned.”
“Who’s your caseworker?”
“S’mantha.”
“Oh.” The receptionist sounded grim. It was an “oh” as in “Oh, you haven’t heard?” The plot thickened.
She put me on hold. Then, someone else picked up. “Who are you holding for?”
“Well . . . S’mantha, I guess.”
“Oh.” This was an even graver “oh.” It was an “I don’t want to be the one to deal with this” “oh.”
I went back on hold for what seemed like an eternity. I’d been to the Rainbow Extensions offices. It was basically one big room with about ten cubicles. I pictured the entire staff popping up like prairie dogs in a panic. “S’mantha call on line one!”
“I’m not answering it!”
“Not my turn!”
“They’re still holding!”
“Someone needs to deal with this!”
“Anyone picked up line one yet?”
Then, finally. “Oh, Christ! I’ll get it!”
A slightly annoyed voice came on the line. “Hello?”
“Yes, I’m calling about S’mantha.”
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“Can you tell me where she is?”
“She’s fine. What is it you need?”
“I need to know what happened to S’mantha!”
Drew was pacing frantically behind me as I spoke. “Are they not telling you? Give me the phone!” I waved him away.
“She’s no longer with Rainbow Extensions,” the voice said, sighing as if my tortuous interrogation had finally broken him.
“We kind of figured that out. Was she fired?”
“She was presented with a career opportunity she couldn’t turn down.” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t intentionally quoting The Godfather. This seemed to be a legitimate Rainbow Extensions talking point.
“Why weren’t we assigned another caseworker?” I asked. “We feel like we don’t matter to Rainbow Extensions.”
“What are your names again?”
About a week later, we received a call from a new woman, Linda. She sounded like she was about eighty years old, hard of hearing, and easily confused. She informed us she would be our interim caseworker until a permanent replacement could be found. Linda gave us a checklist of paperwork and phone consults we needed to complete. We diligently took care of all the outstanding issues, then called Linda to let her know.
She never called us back. She didn’t return our emails. Her phone was always forwarded to voice mail. It was time to give Rainbow Extensions another call, but this time Drew insisted on doing the talking.
“THIS IS FUCKED UP!” he shouted. “This is the worst service I’ve ever dealt with! Don’t you know how much we’re paying you? We’re entrusting you to help us have a baby, and people keep disappearing under mysterious circumstances.”
“There’s nothing mysterious about Linda’s departure. She retired.”
“Without notice? In the middle of the week? Bullshit!”
“That’s what happened.”
“Then why didn’t she tell us she was retiring?”
“You’d have to ask Linda that.”
“I’d love to . . . but I can’t get her on the FUCKING PHONE!”
“Is there something you need?”
“Yeah, I need a supervisor. You’re an idiot.”
A few days later, a man named Maxwell called and introduced himself as our new caseworker. He seemed like a nice guy, but he had clearly drawn the short straw around the office if he had to deal with us. Our first phone call consisted of Drew lecturing him on the proper way to deal with clients and demanding that, if he decided to leave Rainbow Extensions, he had to let us know in writing, in advance, rather than by forwarding his phone to voice mail and never returning.
Over the next nine months, Drew and I built up our savings to around $80,000. I was finally starting to feel at ease with the price tag. We knew Rainbow Extensions might call any day with a surrogate for us, and $80,000 seemed within a comfortable stalling distance of the total.
One day, an email popped up in our in-boxes. “Great news, guys!” Maxwell began. The email included five attachments containing an encyclopedic summation of a human being named Kristen Lander. There was a psych clearance, a medical clearance, a financial accounting, her surrogate application, and a file marked “Photos.” I opened that one first.
She was Caucasian, damn it.
Other than that, she seemed perfectly suited to carry our children. She was stocky and stern and, from the looks of her, could easily kick our asses. She had big blue eyes and a sarcastic smile that just dared you to mess with her. I imagined her voice being gruff and business-like. “Grrr! Baby goes here!” she’d grunt and point to her belly.
A few of the pictures showed her with her three adorabl
e kids. One shot was of her and the twins she’d delivered in a previous surrogacy. There was also an image of her in a T-shirt that read, “Yes, I’m pregnant. No, they’re not mine.” A surrogate with a sense of humor? I was sold.
There aren’t many instances in which you know everything about a person before you even meet them, but whatever the pictures didn’t tell us, Kristin’s application did. Her entire life unfolded in front of us as we read. She worked part-time as a human resources assistant. She was the bassist in a Bangles tribute band. She had a nose piercing and three butterfly tattoos.
Kristen’s husband Paco was a boxy Latino man with large hoop earrings and a goatee. He worked for a moving company. We even saw how much money they made. Together, Kristin and Paco grossed $3,000 a month. The $25,000 surrogacy check would almost double their annual income.
There was nothing overtly gay-friendly about them on the surface, so it was a relief to see that Kristen’s previous surrogacy had also been for a gay couple. I’d always wondered how our surrogate would cope with explaining the gayby in her belly. She’d constantly be answering questions, defending herself to homophobic family members and clergypeople. Having our kid meant opting into the world of homophobia Drew and I took for granted. As she wrote in her application, though, her previous pregnancy was a breeze. Everyone supported her, even her church. She welcomed the prospect of creating another gay family.
Best of all, Kristen’s lady parts were at the top of their game. Her uterus was easier to get into than the University of Phoenix. All of her children had been conceived without much effort, carried full term, and delivered healthy. Her surrogate twins were born at thirty-seven weeks, impressive for a multiple birth. She was the perfect baby incubator.
She was the Womb of Steel.
Maxwell set up an appointment for us to meet Kristin on February 1. It was the five-year anniversary of the day Drew and I first met. It was kismet. We were building the perfect fairy tale to tell our future kid. We read Kristen’s application about ten thousand times, memorized every bit of trivia. We would have killed on Kristen Lander Jeopardy.
“This was Kristen’s course of study in college before dropping out.”
“What is sign language?”
“This is the only medical condition Kristen checked ‘Yes’ to.”
“What is hemorrhoids? Teehee!”
Maxwell asked us if we’d selected an egg donor yet.
“No.”
“Oh.” He sounded concerned. “You should do that before you meet with the surrogate.”
“We were told we’d have plenty of time to do that after we met the surrogate.”
“Oh no,” he said. “Who told you that?”
“S’mantha.”
“Who? Nobody by that name works here.”
7
The Wounded Bird
I’d never given much thought to what my ideal woman would be. It had always been kind of a moot point. As I sat down at my computer to search the Rainbow Extensions egg donor database, I was confronted with a page full of check boxes. Hair color, eye color, height, weight, hobbies. All I had to do was map out Ms. Right and hit “Enter.” I wouldn’t even have to worry if she was out of my league. I could click on any picture and be confident that the stranger I was looking at would willingly entwine her DNA with mine. It was a straight guy’s fantasy—and my worst nightmare.
Drew wanted nothing to do with it, so I offered to weed through the contenders and compile a short list. I hovered over my mouse. She should probably be tall, just to balance out my Smurf-like stature, should I be the sperm donor. She should be smart, happy, and fun. Her essay questions should be free of obvious grammatical and spelling errors. (No child of mine was going to inherit a disrespect for the language!) And I figured she should be at least kind of somewhat moderately physically appealing.
Of course, I had no idea what that meant. I’d spent my entire adolescence wondering what made women attractive, why certain ones made the cover of Vogue while others ladled Salisbury steak onto my Styrofoam lunch tray at school. The worst question one of my guy friends could ask me growing up was, “You think she’s hot?” I knew the wrong answer would be tantamount to confessing, “No, but you are.” But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t tell what separated Chrissy from Janet—or, hell, even from Mrs. Roper. Betty versus Veronica, Ginger versus Mary Ann, Nancy Reagan versus Barbara Bush. I just didn’t have a horse in the race, and it was so hard to pretend otherwise. It was such a relief when Julia Roberts came packaged with the title “Pretty Woman.” It was like having the teacher’s edition to the “You think she’s hot?” textbook. “I’ll tell you who’s hot!” I could say with confidence. “That chick who played Tinkerbell in Hook!” High five!
It’s not that I don’t appreciate female beauty. I just think all women are Julia Robertses, the same way that all art is nice to look at, but please don’t ask me to explain the deeper meaning behind those Jackson Pollock splotches.
As I stared at the search page, wondering how to make my own personal Kelly LeBrock materialize, I decided the best thing to do was just describe myself, only taller and with boobs. Brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin. I hit “Go,” and the screen went nearly blank.
“0 hits,” it read in tiny print. “Return to search page.”
It turns out there was one big problem with finding the perfect woman: Rainbow Extensions had only sixty-six to choose from.
Their photos were taken by the agency’s donor coordinator, poorly lit head shots all framed against the same drab blue wall. From the looks of things, it was a strictly one-take affair. These nervous young girls shuffled into an office and got shoved in a chair, and before they knew what they were doing, a flash went off in their face. There were no reshoots for crooked smiles or half-closed eyes. How they looked at their most vulnerable was exactly how I saw them.
For the most part, they were merely girls, some as young as nineteen. If Drew and I had been straight and foolish, we could have had a daughter this age by now. They had bad hair, freckles, and acne. They weren’t chosen for their emotional preparedness to donate. They were chosen because their ovaries were clown cars cram packed with eggs. These were the women nature deemed most suitable to get pregnant, but if they actually came home knocked up, their parents would have been furious.
As I browsed their profiles, I felt like I was looking at the more sensible, slightly older sisters of the Freshmen. “Xander, I’m totally telling Mom and Dad about that magazine you posed for!” “Go ahead, Kaitlyn! I’ll just tell them you’re selling your eggs to gay dudes.” Oh, Mom and Dad, if you’d just given Xander and Kaitlyn a bigger allowance, none of this would have happened!
If their photos weren’t clear enough indicators of their youth, the essay questions drove the point home. They discussed their poli sci majors, their fondness for indie rock bands I’d never heard of, and, eyes wide with optimism, the corporations they’d be running in five years. They all loved “hanging out” and One Tree Hill. Every single one of them described their sense of humor as “random,” like their generation had secretly convened and decided that “random” was a thing. Some wrote in that shorthand text speak that drives us thirty-somethings nuts. “Wood luv 2 help u.”
Each profile came with a video. Almost without exception, they were like hostage videos. Nervous young girls uttering tightly rehearsed self-promotional pitches fed to them by the interviewer in front of that bare blue wall. “Hi, my name is X and I am Y years old and I go to the University of California at Z.” “My personal interests include snowboarding and . . .” “I want to be an egg donor because . . .” Isn’t this the generation that grew up with MySpace, reality TV confessionals, and sexting? Why were they all so webcam shy?
Dud, dud, dud. I was going through the sixty-six options so fast, I was afraid I would never find The One.
And then I saw her—Kellykins88.
&n
bsp; It was love at first click. She was perfect years old, perfect feet tall, and a sophomore at UC Perfect. She had a bubbly voice and a hearty laugh. She had long blonde hair, oversized blue eyes, and a smile that withstood the requisite mention of her ovaries. For the last few years, she’d been volunteering with autistic kids at a local youth center. Now she dreamed of being a special education teacher. She spoke of herself assuredly but humbly. She was just a girl making a video for a boy, asking him to reproduce with her. She had me at “Do I look at the camera while I talk?”
Kellykins88 was the first candidate I could imagine telling our kid about someday. “We chose her because she was a good person,” I’d explain. “Just like you.”
When Drew got home, I dragged him to my laptop. “I’ve found her!” I squealed.
Drew took a deep breath and waited for me to pull up Kellykins88’s profile.
“This is so weird,” he said. “It’s like I’m getting my first look at our kid!” He was right. It was one of those truly special, totally twenty-first-century moments I’d cherish forever.
“Ewwwwwwwww!” Drew snarled. “Her?!”
His capsule review was not what I’d hoped for.
“What? She’s hot! Isn’t she?”
“She’s Shrek-ish!”
“Just wait till you see her video. She’s so sweet and charming and . . .”
“It talks?!”
“Oh, come on. She’s not that bad.”
Drew waved his hand. “Next!”
There was no point trying to convince him. If I sold him on someone he didn’t like, then I’d always be the one who picked the crummy egg donor. Kid got a D in social studies? Drew could shrug and say, “Well, you picked the egg donor.” No date for the prom? “Blame Daddy Jerry, sweetie. I preferred the cheerleader’s eggs.”
Mommy Man Page 8