Home Game

by Michael Lewis

  That was seven months ago. For seven months I’ve had this scene playing in the back of my mind: face to face with a perfect stranger, I need to explain to him—but probably her—that I’ve come to produce, and to hand over, my sperm. What happens next? How does this conversation play out? I wasn’t sure except it was clear that the easy way out—generating the specimen in the comfort and privacy of one’s home—wasn’t an option, unless one was prepared to pack it just so into an ice chest and race it over to the lab within the hour. Home manufacture wasn’t recommended. So how, exactly, did this business work?

  As it happened I was scheduled for a checkup with my regular doctor, and so used it as an excuse to wait and hear what he had to say about it. “I had that vasectomy we talked about!” I said cheerfully as he took my blood pressure.

  “How did it go?”

  “Hard to say,” I said. Then, as casually as possible, “How do they collect that sperm sample anyway?”

  “You just go to the lab and they give you a cup,” he said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “They don’t do anything to—uh—help you out?”

  “You mean do they provide you with a woman?” he exclaimed, with a great heaving guffaw, loudly enough to be heard up and down the hallway.

  “No, of course not!”

  “Then what do you mean?” he asked.

  I obviously didn’t want to say what I meant. What I meant was that no one could really be expected to walk into some office and tell a complete stranger that he needed not only a place to jerk off, but a cup to do it in. There are limits, even in America, even in 2008. I assumed there had to be a less conspicuous way to handle this problem.

  “It just strikes me as a little socially awkward,” I said.

  “Here,” he said—and he wrote out a request for a blood test. “Just take this in and have the semen work done the same time as the blood work.”

  And so it is that I find myself pedaling my mountain bike over to the nearest offices of Quest Diagnostics, next door to the hospital where all of my children were born. My sweaty palms clutch two forms, one for the blood (the cover), the other for the sperm (the mission). It’ll be quick, I tell myself, like a shot. People do it every day. There must be some obvious protocol.

  There isn’t. What there is, instead, is a small room full of women. Most of them sit at a safe distance in chairs ringing the room, reading three-month-old copies of People magazine, but a few linger around the front desk. The front desk offers no private space; it’s just a desk, with another woman behind it. And not a reassuringly sexless battleship of a woman; a shapely and pretty woman, who looks as if she might never have been on the receiving end of a sperm sample. Worse, the women closest to her desk are not waiting their turn but just waiting. Loitering. Seeing what’s up.

  “Can I help you?” asks the pretty young woman behind the desk.

  I can hear the rustling of Peoples; I can feel the ladies behind me taking an interest in my case. Already I’m sweating from the bike ride. I also have failed to remove my bicycle helmet. I resemble, perhaps, a bike messenger. With a special delivery.

  “I need a blood test,” I say casually. I hand her the form and, as I do, imagine the ladies behind me losing interest. Then, as the lady behind the desk looks over the blood work form, I say quickly, “Also this.” I push across the doctor’s formal request for the scoop on my semen. She looks it over, and motions to a room behind her. “In there for the blood test,” she says discreetly. “For the other you’ll need this.” She hands me a plastic cup and a leaflet. “You don’t do that here. You take it over to our office around the corner.”

  I’d underestimated her. She was clearly an old pro at this. In a stroke she made it easier than I’d ever hoped. No titters; no meaningful eye contact; no embarrassing words—words like “sperm” or “masturbate.” I wasn’t marched off before a crowd into some public chicken chokin’ chamber in which I would be compelled to produce my own seed while strangers with X-ray vision swarmed outside. Everything was on the leaflet, in more or less these words:

  PUT SAMPLE IN CUP.

  DROP CUP AT OTHER OFFICE WHERE NO ONE KNOWS YOU OR WILL EVER SEE YOU AGAIN.

  NO NEED TO DISCUSS DETAILS.

  I gave blood with gusto, then, little cup in hand, marched out into the street and back onto my bike. Only then did it strike me that there was a single unresolved issue: how to get the sample into the cup. Surely that question would answer itself at the second office. The kind and thoughtful and sensitive people of Quest Diagnostics had thought of everything; they, like I, wanted only to minimize the intimacy of our dealings. There’d be some…private place. But then I arrive at the second office.

  This second office has much in common with the first—more old copies of People magazine, more strange women, another stranger behind another desk—but lacks something the other had: a bathroom. I cast in vain around the ground floor of the six-story building, then waste ten minutes riding the elevator in search of a private bathroom. At every floor I get off and march the halls. These other floors indeed have bathrooms, but they’re locked and reserved for patients of the various doctors. Each door I yank more frantically than the last, but none so much as budge. I consider opening one of the dark wooden doors to a doctor’s private offices and asking for a key, but think better of it. I’m not a patient. People might ask questions.

  Now I’m back out on the street, back on my bike, plastic cup in hand. No way I’m going back to the first office with the sad little cup and asking the pretty woman behind the desk to use her bathroom: that would be mortifying and might even violate the Quest Diagnostic rules. I’m handling this myself. Around and around the neighborhood I cycle, scouting locations. The streets of Berkeley were built to accommodate many interest groups—pedestrians, wheelchair riders, cyclists—but apparently no one gave a thought to my perverse own.

  Then I spot the parking garage.

  It’s full; the sign says so. Full is good: no one is going to stumble in looking for a place to park. With no one entering, the only risk is someone exiting—but it’s the middle of the afternoon and the doctors and nurses who have no doubt parked here are still working. It’s dark and peaceful and quiet as a graveyard. I find an especially large SUV and wheel my bike between its front bumper and a concrete wall. Only then does it occur to me:

  YOU ARE ABOUT TO WHACK OFF INTO A SMALL PLASTIC CUP IN A PUBLIC PARKING GARAGE.

  This thought was quickly followed by another:

  YOU’RE GOING TO GET CAUGHT.

  There are those, I am aware, who would find this thought erotic. Happily, I am not among them. This wasn’t going to happen. I cycled back to the first building, where I’d noticed there was an unattended lobby where I could sit and think things over. For the next ten minutes I sat on the green leatherette sofa beside an elderly woman who appeared to be blind. Neither of us said a word. A Google search of the matter had revealed that some huge percentage of men who undergo vasectomies never bother to show up for a test to determine if the thing was a success. We know our strengths. We don’t do well in these situations.

  At length a hospital maintenance person passes through the lobby. Dangling from his belt appear to be about sixty-five keys. He walks purposefully down the long hall, and, after fiddling for many seconds to find the right key, opens a door. I race down the hall after him and put my ear to the unmarked door. Nasty bathroom sounds! There, outside, I wait, for three, four, then five minutes. Finally, with a flush and a roar, he emerges.

  “You want to use it?” he asks.

  “I do.”

  “It’s supposed to be for staff,” he says.

  “That’s okay,” I say.

  “Take your chances,” he says, and lets me enter the cold, cramped, tiled room. It has the charm of a new mausoleum. The odor, too. I lock the door behind me and stare at the ceiling. Self-abuse: never was that term of art more apt.

  Twenty minut
es later, I cycle back to the second Quest Diagnostics office, toss the sad little cup at a jolly man behind the counter, and flee.

  A week later I receive an e-mail from my regular doctor. “The blood test came out great,” he writes. “Congratulations.” Another week passes, then another, but I fail to hear from the surgeon who performed the vasectomy. Finally, I pick up the phone and, feeling a bit as though I’m calling Harvard after the acceptances have been sent out to find out why I haven’t received mine, call him. The woman on the other end of the line, like all his office staff, is Chinese. Her English is broken.

  “What your name?” she asks.

  “Lewis.”

  “Lewis. You wait minute.”

  I wait a minute. I hear rustling, confusion, a muffled conversation.

  “Lewis?”

  “Yes?”

  “You have live sperm!”

  I think: She’s speaking a language not her own. But no matter how I reprocess the sentence, I can’t turn it into “Your operation was a success.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “I just tell you! You have live sperm! You have live sperm!”

  “Yes, but what does that mean?” I ask.

  “Use protection!”

  “Are you saying that the operation didn’t work?”

  I could almost hear her thinking what she’d been told to say, and not say. “Well,” she finally says, “operation not working now!”

  “Can I speak to the doctor?”

  “Doctor with patient.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “He with patient!”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “You want doctor to call you?”

  I did. And he didn’t, for hours. In those hours I came privately to terms with what had just happened. A terrible practical joke. A botched execution. A crime against humanity. Alone and entirely pathetic, I moped around my office and then set off on the day’s errands.

  I’d done my bit. I’d found the leading sperm killer in a twenty-mile radius—the guy had shuttered some of the leading inseminators of the Bay Area. If the sperm of Northern California ever organized themselves into a fighting force, they’d lay siege to his office and run him on a rail out of the state. I’d shown up for the operation, resisted the temptation to flee the table, sweated through a hospital gown, sat around for days on bags of frozen peas, and then, after the scars healed, mourned in silence the death of my reproductive powers. That those powers still roamed the earth wasn’t my fault. Or was it?

  Was it possible that some sperm were simply invincible? So relentless…so determined…that no mere vasectomy was ever going to vanquish them? Just to ask the question was to answer it. By the time I pulled into the Best Buy parking lot I was almost giddy. Nature had created an impossible situation; this thing was out of my or anyone else’s control. This fire would have to burn itself out naturally.

  About then my cell phone rang. Standing between the Best Buy customer service counter and the shelf displaying the new Hewlett-Packard desktop computers, I looked down and saw that the good doctor was finally calling me back. I answered, and set out to explain how I was coming to terms with my sperm’s invincibility, when he cut me off.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “They send us back this form and there’s a box that says ‘between zero and one sperm.’ That’s the box they checked. But what does that mean? How can there be between zero and one sperm?”

  “You tell me.”

  “They found one sperm. It could have been one that had been attached to a tube and got knocked off when you produced the sample. Who knows?”

  “But it says I have live sperm.”

  “It says you had one sperm.”

  One heroic sperm. This one final sperm had gone by itself into the death-dealer’s lab at Quest Diagnostics. It had fought the battle, so that others might live. I should hunt it down and give it a proper burial.

  “The typical sample has twenty million live sperm in it.”

  “But if there’s one there must be more, right?”

  “Look,” he says, “who knows where that one came from? The bottom line is that you’re not going to get anyone pregnant ever again.”

  I think about this.

  “You can come in to talk about it if you want,” he says kindly.

  Oddly enough, I don’t.

  But that night I have a dream. I dream that Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, is the starting point guard for the New York Knicks. In this dream, the entire New York Knicks team, bench players included, lay slumbering in a giant bed beside me, when an old girlfriend of mine storms into the room and wakes me up. The old girlfriend doesn’t resemble her old self, however, but appears in the guise of a large, hairy rat. Most of the dream involves wrestling her out of the room, avoiding her many attempts to lick me with her wet, sloppy rat-tongue, and preventing her from waking up the Knicks, who have a big game the next day.

  All of which is a backhanded tribute to the sheer power of the sleeping pills they give new mothers with severe panic disorder. These pills are all that remain of Tabitha’s postpartum panic attacks and they’ve been a godsend, not just to her but also to me: They’d put an elephant to sleep. Eager for what looked as if it might be a well-earned rest, I’d popped one of them—moments later Nick Lemann was dishing out assists and jacking up three-point shots.

  And the only reason I remember any of it is that I’m awakened before it ends, by a small child standing beside my bed. Every few months one or the other of the girls shows up in our bedroom in the middle of the night—bright-eyed, sneaky smiles—to announce she’s having a nightmare. Tonight, I see, we have Dixie.

  “Daddy, I had a bad dream,” she says.

  My mind is having trouble making the transition from my own weird space to hers. What was the point of that giant hairy rat? And the Knicks? Maybe after this strange and unsettling day I needed some professional athletes around as symbols of manhood—but then surely I would have picked the Celtics, or even the Hornets. Then I remember: It was Nick Lemann who said I shouldn’t write about my kids, especially as they grew older, because I’d screw them up. Nick’s usually right about everything, so he’s probably right about this, too. Has the time come, perhaps, to stop writing about them? If so, what will I have to look back on at the end of it?

  Like dreams, these fatherhood moments are easily forgotten and no doubt also a lot more interesting to the teller than to anyone else. But when they’re forgotten, their lessons, such as they are, are lost. The vacuum winds up being filled by experts on child rearing, and books on fatherhood, and social counselors and psychiatrists—the outside world has a lot to tell you about how to be a father and how to raise your children, and its advice no doubt serves some purpose. It fails, however, to get across with sufficient clarity the final rule of fatherhood: If you’re not bothered by it, or disturbed by it, or messed up from it, you’re probably doing something wrong that will mess up your kids. You’re probably doing something wrong anyway, but that’s okay: You can only do so much to mess up your kids. They can always get back at you, in therapy or their memoirs. But if you don’t monitor these small creatures closely, they have the power to screw you up forever. So watch out for yourself—but don’t let anyone know that’s what you’re doing.

  I’m still staring into the shadow of a six-year-old. “What did you dream?” I say, dragging Dixie into our bed, and noting that the digital clock reads 3:22.

  “I dreamed I was all alone,” she says.

  “How’d that make you feel?”

  “Sad. I was crying. Real crying.”

  With that she scrambles gleefully up and into the space between mother and father, and proves again that a California king-sized bed is so big that it can comfortably sleep three adults or one six-year-old child.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Much of this book appeared over the last eight years as part of a peripatetic series in Slate, the Web ma
gazine founded by Michael Kinsley—Quinn’s godfather—and subsequently edited by Jacob Weisberg. Jacob has children the same ages as my first two, and if he’s never matched my self-pity he has often encouraged it. Al Zuckerman, who has represented me ably for many years, came up with the idea of expanding the things I’d written for Slate into a book. The first reaction of many readers to the original series was to pity the woman who was married to its author. Her name is Tabitha Soren, and I do, at times, pity her. Mainly I’m grateful to her, however. She served as editor, fact-checker, and, of course, incubator of the source material.