by David Rakoff
Along with my scar, my tattoos, and my numbness, these straws of sperm are the only things I have left from that time in my life, a period of eighteen months that I have generally tried to not think about. At the age of thirty-five I’m starting to feel that it’s bad juju to continue to ignore it. So I am off to find the straws, just in time for their microscopic bar mitzvahs.
My decision to write about my quest is as much about providing myself with a welcome screen of white noise as it is about any need for documentation. My clutching a notebook while searching for the perfect one-liner will be a comfortable distraction from what might result in my feeling something, which is never my first choice.
I was treated at PMH: the Princess Margaret Hospital, the main cancer facility in Toronto. If you were a child at any time from the 1930s through the 1950s, living anywhere in the British empire, chances are you were inundated with images of the two young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Elizabeth would eventually become queen, of course, but Margaret was always considered to be somewhat prettier, and simply by virtue of her thwarted ascendancy to the throne, she was less duty-bound and consequently more fun. Kicky, almost. As she grew up and had her serial doomed romances, Margaret gave the Commonwealth public a taste of the kind of low-rent scandal we could later come to expect from the house of Windsor. It’s not as if she was a slattern or an embarrassment. Calling it the Princess Margaret Hospital is not like naming it the Billy Carter. It’s more affectionate than that, more glamorous: the Tricia Nixon might be more apt.
The harvesting of sperm before chemotherapy is a fairly standard practice. Chemo makes you sterile. They suggest it to most male patients of a certain age. It is certainly the most important sperm sample I have ever given, but it is not the first. In 1982, as a freshman, I sold it once. Every bulletin board in my dormitory on 114th Street and Amsterdam Avenue had the following flyer: “College Men! Make Money Now!” It was an advertisement for a midtown sperm bank. We would be paid close to fifty dollars to do, under somewhat more controlled circumstances, the very thing that was occupying a great deal of our waking lives anyway. The lab was very interested in our seed: the Sperm of the Ivy League. There’s something so obscenely vital, so borderline eugenic, about that image, imbued with a potency and a Riefenstahlian vision of the future. It was a stereotype much greater than the actual sum of its parts, I can assure you, given some of the knock-kneed Hebrews I went to school with, myself included. The lab wanted a fine-boned lacrosse player with a thatch of blond hair and a trust fund. What they got were pigeon-chested wiseacres who hardly belonged in that febrile pantheon of porn archetypes: the Cop Who Might Be Convinced Not to Write a Ticket; the Frustrated Repairman in Need of a Hand; the Pizza Boy Deserving of a Tip Yet Strangely Enough Not Carrying Any Change; and me for that brief afternoon in that small room with an acoustic tile ceiling, under fluorescent lights: the Strapping College Boy in the Examination Room (Hey, Coach, I think I pulled a muscle in my groin).
I remember nothing from that day. I cannot tell you if there were dirty magazines, although I suspect there were. I cannot remember being embarrassed, although I’m sure I was, and I cannot remember what I was paid, although forty dollars cash rings a bell. The conflation of climax and commerce cannot have failed to escape my notice. At age seventeen, it felt like sexual transgression. I suppose it still does, since until this story I have never told anyone about it.
Hanging on the wall on the way to the radiation room in the old hospital was a photograph of Princess Margaret’s hand, taken on the occasion of the inauguration of the building. It was actually an X-ray photograph, so Her Highness’s jewelry glows white against the bones and the vaporous gray of her invisible flesh. I look at it every time I go for treatment.
The radiation room itself is a lead-lined interior chamber of the hospital. Two red laser beams cross over the exact center of the table where the patients lie. Using the cross of four small black tattoos on my torso, the technicians line me up and ready me for the thousands of rads of radiation.
The machine is bulbous, huge, and a dull hospital green. A death ray straight out of fifties sci fi. I lie down and look up. Above my head, directly at eye level, someone has drawn a hastily rendered happy face in red marker. Underneath that is written the message “Give Us a Smile!” As with Rita Hayworth’s picture that graced the side of the atom bomb they dropped on Bikini atoll, there’s something so pathetic, so vastly outmatched, about this little happy face; a garnish on annihilation. Still, I never fail to smile. Even when I reach the point in the treatments when most of my hair has fallen out and my throat has been burned to such an extent that I cannot swallow, I smile.
They haven’t stopped at the happy face, either. Every time the lead door closes, latching with a booming clank, so too begins the music. The same song every time. The same place in the same song every time: the full horn section buildup to the chorus of the song “You’re Just Too Good to Be True.” The plutonium drops down into the central cone, a warm wind starts to blow on my chest, indicating that I’m now getting the equivalent of a lifetime’s worth of the recommended dose of gamma radiation. And I smile.
It’s not all that hard, after all, to locate the missing sperm lab. A few phone calls and I find that it has been moved, lock, stock, and barrel, to another, more centrally located hospital. When I finally call them up directly to see if they still have my straws, they know all too well who I am. Like cops who spend a lifetime chasing a fugitive who, tired of years of running, gives up and turns himself in, the folks at the sperm bank taste the victory of finally nabbing a long-sought quarry; they’ve been waiting for me. Or, more precisely, for my money. There are apparently years of storage fees outstanding. I owe close to a thousand dollars. My account was years in arrears and referred to collection. What would have happened if I had never checked up on this? Would I one day be walking past some pawnshop in Toronto and there in the window, next to the watches, the saxophone, and the old Canadian Legion of Honor war medallions, see three straws of my semen, thawing out in a dusty shaft of sunlight?
The folks at the lab view me with suspicion, but not because I am a Deadbeat Dad. What the folks at the lab are (rightfully) disquieted by is my need to frame my resurfacing as a story. They don’t really understand why I want to tell it. They see my return and even the accrual of the debt—something that I have taken full responsibility for—as an indictment of them. “But we sent you bills!” the nursing manager says defensively when I am no more than thirty seconds into introducing myself on the phone. She’s absolutely right, and I don’t deny it. I vaguely recall receiving a bill in my old apartment and ignoring it. That was at a time in my life when I didn’t want to know or remember anything about that year. If anyone’s to blame for the trail having gone cold, I am, and I fully stipulate to this charge.
But my mea culpa is not enough to penetrate the chilly officiousness of the lab. They don’t seem to want to talk to me. They are not interested in providing me with fodder for what they clearly see as a very fishy expedition. I try to ingratiate myself. In appealing to their sympathetic natures, I am reduced to using icky tricks, preambling each phone call by describing myself as having been “a cancer patient,” talking about my need for “closure,” and so forth. All of which seems a little melodramatic to me and leaves them almost completely unmoved anyway. Or, if I’m not being treacly, I’m playing the ridiculous schlemiel, stammering and apologizing: Lucy Ricardo losing Little Ricky while out shopping. It all leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I am finally thrust into that long-sought movie scenario “Things were fine in this town before that writer showed up!” and I’m not sure I like it. They smell a rat, and that rat is me. What begin as frosty but cordial relations between the nursing manager and myself devolve steadily. By the time I fly to Toronto, she refuses to speak with me outright. I am Scrooge revisiting Christmas past, walking through a room, trying to right a wrong, and being completely unheard and unable to physically materi
alize. I will be able to pay the balance of storage fees, but I will not be able to see the facility, tour the vault or wherever it is they keep the straws, or ask her my many medical questions. My audience with the sperm of the Ivy League is denied.
I am now referred to a woman who works in the corporate communications department of the hospital that houses the sperm bank. She is to be my liaison. “Your project sounds really innaresting?” the PR woman tells me. “But I’m sorry we can’t help you with it. If I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
I was once employed in corporate communications. As a framer of official meaning for someone else’s mouth, I often used that very phrase in the name of my superiors: “If I can be of any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to call me.” But I never had the temerity to use it when I hadn’t actually been of some assistance to begin with.
I recall the last time I saw these fugitive children of mine. It was in the summer of 1987. By that time my illness was fairly advanced, I was some thirty-five pounds underweight: an old man at the age of twenty-three. Virtually the last thing on my mind was onanism. I had been told if I could get the sample downtown to the lab within forty-five minutes, I could do the “harvest” at home. To this end, the lab technician at the sperm bank had given me some sterile containers. In the abstract, this sounded far more comfortable, producing my sample in the privacy of my childhood bedroom.
But privacy isn’t really the name of the game when your mother has to drive you to the hospital. I have never been licensed by a sitting government to drive a car, and I am far too weak to take public transport. By happy coincidence, my mother’s office is two blocks away from the hospital. It is a precisely timed operation. After breakfast she says to me euphemistically, “I’m going to start the car. Why don’t you go upstairs and get ready?”—emphasis and winking italics my own. If this freaks her out, she doesn’t let on. She’s a physician herself, so it might just seem par for the course to tell your youngest child to go upstairs and salute the archbishop and then join you in the car.
My deed done, not my finest effort after what has arguably been half a lifetime of practice, I put on my coat and grab the jar. It is made of clear plastic. In college, my friend’s parents came to New York for a psychoanalysts’ convention. Getting onto a hotel elevator, crowded with their colleagues, my friend turned to his mother and stage-whispered, “Jocasta, I want you.” But it is just me and my mother in the car. There are no Freudians to entertain with the discomfort of the Oedipal situation. Even in my weakened state, I’m certainly not going to ride next to my mother with a transparent vial of spooge in my lap. I look around the kitchen for a suitable bag and find the perfect one. It is four by six, of white paper. It has clearly been in the kitchen since I was very young, because when I turn it over I see that it’s printed with the image of an orange pumpkin and a black cat and, in dripping, blood-soaked calligraphy, the words Trick or Treat.
I fly up to Toronto on a gray day in January of the new century, visiting, for the first time, the new Princess Margaret facility. It is beautiful, occupying an old art deco insurance building. It is imposing and elegant and graced in the center with a soaring six-story atrium. It is nothing like the old hospital where I was treated. I feel a little jealous as I walk in. There is even a multifaith chapel, which I don’t recall from the old place. Outside of it, on a white board, someone on staff has written: “Just a thought:” and then a quote: “Joy is not in things, it is in us.” It is attributed to one Robert Wagner, whose dates are 1813 to 1883. Presumably this is a different Robert Wagner from the wattle-concealing, turtleneck-wearing star of The Towering Inferno and Hart to Hart. So different a Robert Wagner, in fact, that when I try to look him up in my Bartlett’s Quotations, he is not listed. Who is listed there, with exactly the same dates, however, is Richard Wagner, he of the proto-Nazi operas of heroic übermenschen. This puts a decidedly different spin on this little homily. And, funnily enough, Bartlett’s doesn’t list this lovely caveat against materialism among the composer’s notable quotes. But it’s a lot more suitable for an oncology chapel, after all, than “To be German means to carry on a matter for its own sake,” don’t you think?
This new place is completely devoid of anything I might recall. Not a single doctor who treated me still works here. All along the front hallway are framed pictures of hospital directors past, my oncologist among them. Like most official portraits in oils, it misses something essential about the person. Now he just looks benignly Olympian and creamy. In the entrance is an official royal portrait of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret. Taken recently—in 1998, according to the frame—she wears a gown of mushroom-colored satin, adorned with jeweled medals. And of course, being a real princess, she wears a crown. But the truly stunning feature, the one that announces to the world that we should not for an instant confuse her with her dowdy older sister, is Margaret’s hair, a startling shade of brown-black. The unrelieved shock of too-youthful darkness over her not unattractive face of a certain age has turned her otherwise friendly smile into a toothy leer, that last tenuous stage of propriety before full-blown laughter at a dirty joke. It makes her look what used to be called “fast.” Behold another porn archetype: the Randy Divorcée, lingering at her front door, swirling the ice cubes in her midday highball, saying to the strapping gardener, “You must be tired and sweaty after all that yardwork. C’mon in and cool off in the air-conditioning.”
As for the fondly remembered X-ray photograph of her hand, it is nowhere to be seen. I ask the volunteer at the desk if they brought it here from the old facility.
“It was on the way to radiation,” I say.
“I was also a radiation patient,” she replies. “I don’t remember it.” She is apologetic. I then ask her if she remembers the music during treatment. She doesn’t dismiss my recollection, but she’s not sure herself, it was so long ago. All memory is porous. Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. But of these two details—that X-ray photograph, that music—I am sure.
I think.
Since no one official or medical will talk to me at the sperm bank and I don’t know anyone anymore at the cancer hospital, I spend the better part of two days hanging around the atrium. No one pays me any mind. When I look up I can see that the railings on the floors above are shielded with Plexiglas about eight feet high, well over the head of any potentially suicidal patient. Not long prior to my trip, I had a drink in a hotel with a huge atrium that goes up at least thirty stories. I asked the waitress if people ever pitched themselves over the sides in what would be a very public and punishing death, landing with a viscous splat at the patent-leather Mary Janed feet of a little girl on her way to her first Broadway show. The waitress seemed so bored, so in hate with her job, that when she answered my question with, “Yeah, thirteen people so far,” there was an almost wistful tone in her voice, as though a falling body might just break up the monotony of her day.
Paradoxically, here at the cancer hospital things are decidedly cheerier. I walk back and forth, I listen to an extremely good jazz quartet playing the lunchtime concert. All hospitals are built around waiting. I don’t stand out. In my year and a half of treatment at Princess Margaret, eighteen months of waiting, I never once saw anything that could have remotely been described as attitude. Not one patient, patient’s guardian, partner, or parent ever got pissy that I could see. And I’ll go out on a limb here and say that in the world of cancer it’s not inconceivable that someone might have a right to feel like being at least a little pissy.
It might speak to that stereotypical Canadian reserve, but I choose to see it a little more heroically and politically. When medicine is socialized, when you have true universal health care, when everyone’s treatment is the same regardless of socioeconomic station, those strong-arming attitudes of entitlement just aren’t part of the vocabulary. This atrium,
this lovely space in a hospital with a world-class reputation, is actually the equivalent of a state hospital. That American sense that someone somewhere else is getting what you’re not, and the attendant demands that go along with that perceived injustice, well, it’s just not in the equation here.
I’ve recently been told there is a chance that so many years after cure, my fertility might have rebounded. I decide to get tested back in New York, if only to stop having to pay the storage fees on my old sample. My friend Scott, who, for other reasons, was getting tested around that time, told me stories about the comfort and sheer titillation of the lab he went to: armchairs, privacy, pornography of every stripe; a masturbatorium, he called it. Maybe it’s an insurance thing, because at the Upper East Side lab I go to, I am given a plastic vial, a Zip-loc bag imprinted with the international symbol for biohazard, that vaguely sinister trillium, and pointed to the bathroom. It is directly off the reception area.
Have you ever been a temp, or in your first week in a new job, and right outside your cubicle your new office-mates hold a birthday party for one of their number? Do you remember how alienating and strange and embarrassing and generally impeding of your performance that birthday party was? I am the only patient in the lab that morning and the only man in the place. Through the door I can hear the technicians talking about their weekends, the scratch of the receptionist’s ballpoint as she fills out a magazine quiz, the crisp turning of a glossy page. This feels very public. To add to my difficulties, the bathroom is a standard-issue interior with very little to jog the mind. I peek out through the slats of the metal blinds on the window; maybe I can find a construction site or something to focus on. Nothing doing.
In the end, species will out, and I manage. Sheepishly I leave my sample at the front counter and leave. Why must everything be clear plastic?