The Genius Factory (18 page)

Eventually, Roger said, Joy had squirmed off his lap, scooted over to her stroller, and tried to pull herself into it. She couldn’t manage it on her own, so Roger had lifted her up and placed her in the seat. Joy had been annoyed at the assistance. She had slid herself off the stroller and tried again till she managed to climb in by herself. This also reminded Roger of his beloved sister, who could never tolerate being helped. Roger had turned to Rebecca and said, “We really have ourselves something special here.” After forty minutes, Dora had told Roger they would have to leave. Roger had kissed Joy and said, “I will see you again.” She couldn’t understand him, of course, and he had known it was impossible, that he could never see her again.

Roger’s reaction to the visit showed why sperm banks forbid meetings between donor and child. Roger was supposed to be a detached, anonymous donor, a source of fine DNA and nothing more. But this visit had bonded him to Joy. She was no longer simply “donor offspring.” She was his
daughter.
When he got home from seeing Joy at the Repository, Roger wrote a letter to her, a letter he could not send, since he did not know her last name or address. In it he told Joy that the visit had been enough to make him feel like a father. He had kept the letter since then, locked away safely at home.

After meeting baby Joy, Roger tried to accept that he would never hear from her again. But a few years later, he started receiving occasional photos of Joy, sent by Beth and passed on by the Repository. When the Repository permitted the correspondence between him and Beth to accelerate in 1995 and 1996, he was ecstatic. He wrote much less than he wanted, for fear the Repository would stop the letters if he was too avid. Roger framed the pictures of Joy that Beth sent. He hung a collage of eight snapshots in his living room and put the photo of Joy skiing—blurry, unrecognizable—above the mantelpiece. He was proudest of a picture of Joy sitting on the lap of a Confederate soldier. Dora had told Beth about Roger’s dream of his Confederate great-grandfather. When Joy was two Beth had taken her to a Civil War reenactment near their town and had a photo taken of Joy with a Confederate soldier. Beth had thought Donor White would appreciate the coincidence. Roger showed me a photocopy of the picture of Joy and the reenactor. The soldier in the picture, he said, looked just like his great-grandfather in the dream.

Donor White was heartbroken when the correspondence with Beth ceased in 1997. He didn’t know why it had ended, because the Repository didn’t send him the explanation that it sent Beth. Then, two years later, he received a letter from the Repository’s medical director, announcing that the sperm bank was closing. Roger feared that once the bank closed, his faint remaining hope of finding Beth and Joy again would vanish. He started improvising. He reexamined the photographs Beth had sent him. Printed on the back of one—and overlooked by the Repository—were the name and address of a Pennsylvania photo studio. Then he studied Beth’s correspondence and noticed that she had used personal stationery for the first letter she had sent, way back in 1991. That stationery was embossed with a lily. It occurred to him that her last name might be “Lily.” He searched for an Elizabeth Lily in every state. He found only one, and she lived in Pennsylvania, near the town where the photo studio was located. He immediately sent a letter to her. It was extremely cryptic. In it, he wrote that a person named Beth had befriended him through a third party and that third party was no longer available to pass on information. If Beth Lily was the Beth who had befriended him, then she could write to him at such and such an e-mail address. He added that he had only the very best intentions toward Beth and that if she was the wrong person, she should please discard this strange letter. He put no return address on it. No one but Beth herself would have had the foggiest idea what he meant.

Roger had guessed wrong, and he heard nothing back from Elizabeth Lily. He resigned himself to the loss and to a life without children. He filled his retirement with studying Civil War history and investigating his family tree. In 1999, he finally told his eighty-nine-year-old mother about his sperm bank kids. She took the news very cheerfully. When she died a few months later, Roger was relieved that he had shared the secret with her.

In early 2001, right at the time I published Beth’s plea for Donor White in
Slate,
Roger fell seriously ill. I had feared his yearlong silence might have meant he was dead, and, in fact, he almost was. Although he slowly recovered, he wasn’t the same man. The illness had left him with permanent complications. He had shed thirty pounds, wasting down to skin and bones. He couldn’t jog anymore. He wasn’t even seventy yet, but he could barely manage to shop for groceries now. A great specimen of a man, he had become weak, his athletic body slack. If his body was broken, his spirit was worse. “I thought, ‘Life is not worth living. If I die now, that’s fine.’ ” As he slowly recuperated, Roger berated himself for having spent his life in the lab. He belittled his scientific accomplishments; his patents meant nothing next to his nineteen children—the children he would never know.

In June 2002, a friend e-mailed him a Web page with a link to an Internet search engine, Alltheweb.com. Roger was a novice Web surfer. He had never even heard of search engines. He went to Alltheweb, and the first thing he typed in was “genius sperm bank.” The first entries were for my
Slate
series on the Repository. He scrolled down the page. Halfway down he saw this listing: “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White.’ ” He was stunned. He e-mailed me that day.

June 16, 2002—four days after Roger wrote to me—was Father’s Day. Roger logged on to AOL. “You’ve got mail.” A message from an unfamiliar address was waiting. He opened it. It was from Beth. It began, “Happy Father’s Day!”

CHAPTER 9

MY SHORT, SCARY CAREER

AS A SPERM DONOR

Retrieving vials of frozen sperm from a liquid-nitrogen storage tank.
Courtesy of California Cryobank

I
realized that I needed to donate sperm, too. Not because I wanted to, quite the contrary. My son had been born in early 2003, so I was the father of two children, which seemed more than enough on most days. My lack of desire to donate is why I felt obliged to do it. No matter how often donors explained themselves to me, sperm donation befuddled me. I nodded and smiled at them as they listed their reasons, but my own brain was snickering. Why had they subjected themselves to such inconvenience? To such embarrassment? Roger had made the most compelling possible case for sperm donation to me, and I still didn’t get it. I had to find out for myself what I was missing.

I dutifully informed my wife about the plan to donate. “No way,” Hanna said. I argued that it was all in the name of research. She was unimpressed. I promised that I would stop the sperm bank before it could sell my sperm. She said she didn’t believe the bank would make such a deal. I swore that there was no chance they would use my sperm. I begged, which was not a pretty sight. She relented.

These days, all sperm banks recruit customers and donors through the Internet, so I cruised the Web and quickly found an application for the big local bank: Fairfax Cryobank, located in Washington, D.C.’s, Virginia suburbs. Fairfax Cryobank is to sperm banking what Citigroup is to real banking. It has branches in four states and Canada. The sperm bank itself is only one small division of a full-service fertility business, the Genetics & IVF Institute.

I completed Fairfax’s online application in a couple of minutes—it asked for the barest minimum of information, hardly more than my name and address. A week later, the mailman delivered a brown envelope with no name on the return address. Sperm banks, like pornographers, keep everything on the down low: mail invariably arrives in discreet envelopes. Bank staffers dislike leaving phone messages, but if they must, the message is almost incomprehensibly vague: “This is Mary, from Fairfax”—Fairfax what? I would ask myself—“We’d like to talk to you about your recent inquiry. Please call us at . . .”)

The brown package from Fairfax contained the full application, an eighteen-page slog. I trudged through the physical data: age, hair color, height, weight, blood type. Then I dragged my way through the biographical section: educational history, profession, musical talent (“None,” I wrote proudly), athletic abilities, hobbies. Then I labored through the medical questionnaire: alcohol use, tobacco use, drug use, tattooing history, how well I sleep, how well I eat, what medicines I take and why, what bones I have broken, whether I exchange sex for money, whether I had used intranasal cocaine in the preceding twelve months. I listed three generations of familial mental illness and felt my own ticker skip a beat when I wrote that all my male ancestors on both sides of the family had died young of heart disease. I declared that I wasn’t a carrier of Gaucher’s disease, Fanconi’s anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Canavan disease, or thalassemia, although I had not the faintest idea what those illnesses were. I had to check off whether I suffered from any of an endless roster of symptoms—hoarseness, warts, blood in stool, goiter, tingling, dizziness, fainting, convulsions, seizures, fits, shaking, tremor, numbness. By the time I was done, I was suffering from several of them. I was asked sixteen ways to Sunday if I inject drugs or have sex with other men. I agreed to submit to an HIV test. Finally, I reached page eighteen, which was the scariest of all: “I agree that I release all rights, privileges, and disposition of my semen specimens to Fairfax Cryobank.” Hanna is going to kill me, I thought, and then I signed it.

According to the application, if my written application made the cut, I would be invited for an interview, where I would “produce” a semen sample for analysis. If that were satisfactory, I would return for more semen analyses and a physical. Only if I passed those would I qualify as a donor.

I mailed my application to Fairfax and waited. And waited. And waited. After two months, I was furious. How dare they ignore my semen? That semen had produced two healthy children! That semen had graduated from an Ivy League college! That semen had run a marathon! Then my rage turned to worry: Did Fairfax know something I didn’t about my health? Was my future that bleak? Was all that heart disease really so bad? Suddenly I found myself desperate to be chosen.

I had finally given up on Fairfax and applied to a bank in New York when I received an e-mail from Amanda, who identified herself as Fairfax’s laboratories coordinator. She invited me for an interview. She noted, oh so casually, that I would have to furnish a sample on the premises.

I made an appointment for the following Monday. Fairfax Cryobank was located beyond the Washington Beltway in The Land of Wretched Office Parks. The cryobank was housed in the dreariest of all office developments. To call the building anonymous would insult anonymity. The ugliness may be intentional: a sperm bank doesn’t want to draw attention to itself or its visitors. I hunted through the first-floor corridors, past the mysterious “microsort” room and “egg donor” facility, searching for the sperm bank office. I saw an open door and peeked in. I had stumbled on the
vault—
the room that housed Fairfax’s liquid-nitrogen storage tanks. I ducked inside and found myself alone with the tanks. There were four of them. They were head high and looked like fat silver men. I knew that each tank held tens of thousands of vials, each vial filled with millions of spermatozoa. My skin got clammy: it felt like the scene in the science fiction movie when the hero accidentally discovers the warehouse where the “friendly” aliens are freezing the millions of humans they have secretly kidnapped for their terrible experiments.

Finally I located the door marked “Cryobank” and walked into an uncomfortably cramped waiting room. A couple—not a young couple—was sitting there. They looked up, startled, when I entered. We half smiled uncomfortably at each other. All of us instantly recognized the awkward situation. They were there to buy sperm; I was there to sell it. We had each accidentally looked through a window into a world we did not want to see. I was sure the couple was thinking,
That guy
is a donor? The hell with this place, let’s go to Sperm World instead.

I flagged down the receptionist, who assumed I was a customer, too. When I explained I was there to see Amanda about donating, she was chagrined. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had apparently come in the wrong door. Amanda was summoned from her office and hustled me into the back, out of sight of the couple.

Amanda led me to her office, a cozy place with wedding pictures and prints of sailing ships. She checked my driver’s license to make sure I was who I claimed to be. Then she pulled out my application and began reviewing it with me, line by line. In
tone,
it felt like a job interview with a vice president for human resources. In
subject,
it was rather different. “Okay, so you live in Washington, great. And your blood is B positive. You sure of that? No? That’s okay, we’ll check it. Hmm, so your family is from eastern Europe. Do you know exactly where? Can you check?” She noticed I was married and asked if my wife knew that I was there. I answered, “Of course. Don’t all wives know?”

Amanda acted as though this was very funny and said, “A lot of donors are married and don’t tell their wives.” (And
these
are the guys you want to father children?)

She asked me where I had gone to college. I said “Harvard.” She was delighted. She continued, “And have you done some graduate work?” I said no. She looked disappointed. “But surely you are
planning
to do some graduate work?” Again I said no. She was deflated and told me why. Fairfax has something it calls—I’m not kidding—its “doctorate program.” For a premium, mothers can buy sperm from donors who have doctoral degrees or are pursuing them. What counts as a doctor? I asked. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, optometry, law (lawyers are doctors? yes—the “juris doctorate”), and chiropractic. Don’t say you weren’t warned: your premium “doctoral” sperm may have come from a student chiropractor.

After a few minutes discussing the application, my attention wandered. I gazed absently at Amanda’s screen saver, a soothing blue-and-white pattern just over her shoulder. After a few seconds, I noticed that the white pattern wasn’t a pattern. It was a school of tiny sperm, tails waving jauntily as they motored across the screen. I took a second look at the mouse paperweight on Amanda’s desk. It wasn’t a mouse. It was a cute little sperm.

Such goofiness was, I came to discover, a hallmark of modern sperm banks. Fairfax hands out pens on college campuses that ask, “Why not get paid for it?” When I visited California Cryobank, the director of public relations gave me a T-shirt depicting swimming sperm. Around the sperm ran a circle of text that read “Future People” in a dozen different languages. California Cryobank distributes pens, too. They’re floaty pens, with a little plastic sperm swimming up and down, up and down.

Anyway, back to Amanda. At this point I am obliged to point out that Amanda was cute. In fact, she was distractingly cute. She was thirty, I’d guess, and looked Latina. She smiled all the time, a sexy, gleaming smile, and laughed when I made even the lamest stab at a joke. She leaned across her desk toward me as we talked.

Rule number one of sperm banking: The people who recruit donors are invariably women, and they are invariably good-looking. I suspect—no, I am sure—that this is deliberate, to get donors excited to join the Fairfax team.

Yet Amanda’s sexiness presented a kind of paradox. The chief activity of the sperm bank—its entire purpose—is masturbation. But my interview with Amanda was actually designed to
desexualize
what I would be doing. The goal of the interview seemed to be to eliminate the embarrassment that men feel about masturbation by replacing it with tedium. After the endless review of my application, Amanda walked me step by countless step through the qualification process—if my sperm count was above such-and-such a number, I would make the next round. There would be blood tests for gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis, and lots of scary diseases I had never heard of. They would give me a renal ultrasound. My sperm would again be counted, frozen, thawed, and recounted. Its motility—how well it swims—would be tested and retested. Only then would I finally be admitted as a donor—and even that was contingent on passing regular blood tests. Amanda then listed what I would be required to supply to the bank if I qualified: baby photos, an audio CD about myself, essays on such topics as “What is your most memorable childhood experience?” and “What is the funniest thing that ever happened to you?”

After that, Amanda held forth enthusiastically and at great length about money. “You will get paid $50 per usable specimen, for starters. Then you will get $5 for every vial from the specimen. The average is ten to fourteen vials per specimen. When a vial is released from quarantine after six months, you will get another $5. So the average payment is $209 per deposit.” She paused. “Now, this is ordinary income, but we don’t do withholding. We send checks twice a month, but later we will just give you a check every six months. We will send you a 1099 form at the end of the year.”

Amanda had managed to take a mysterious and sexual and profound process and make it sound exactly like . . . a job. I considered asking her about the 401(k) and dental benefits.

Finally, it was time for the money shot. She led me next door to the lab, where three women in lab coats were chatting about their weekends while gazing at sperm samples under microscopes. They ignored me. When I became a regular donor, Amanda said, I would come straight to the lab to collect a sterile cup and a labeling sticker. She handed me a cup. Amanda pointed to a small incubator—a warm metal box—where I would put the “specimen” when I was done. Next to the incubator was a pile of plastic sachets; they looked like the mustard packets you get with a deli sandwich. “That’s KY jelly,” she said. “It’s nontoxic for sperm. Still, just try not to get it, you know, on the
sample.
”

Amanda escorted me back down the hall to a donor room. Fairfax has two of these—sometimes known in the trade as “blue rooms” or “masturbatoriums.” The room was really no more than a large closet. A dingy beige love seat was pushed against the far wall. An erotic print hung on the wall above the sofa. It was a painting of a woman from behind; she was wearing some diaphanous lingerie. It was pretty sexy, to be honest. On another wall were a clock, a sink, and a cabinet. Amanda handed me a pen and told me to write the time of ejaculation on the cup when I was done. She turned on the taps and instructed, “Wash your hands with this antibacterial soap, and dry them
well.
Water is toxic for semen.”

“Here’s the exhaust fan.” She flipped a switch by the door, and a buzzing noise covered the room. She opened the cabinet again. “And here are the magazines.” She handed me a stack of
High Society
s,
Gallery
s, and
Playboy
s, all, shall we say, well thumbed. “Fairfax Cryobank” was scrawled on the cover of each of the porno mags. Amanda, who did this routine several times a day, seemed unfazed. It was just a commercial transaction for her. I pretended I was unfazed, too.