The Genius Factory (23 page)

Samantha called medical schools in southern California. More dead ends. I proposed digging through California divorce records, since we knew Jeremy had split from his wife in the mid-1980s. Samantha considered hiring a research assistant to help us. We had mostly been searching online, but on a lark, I suggested that Samantha call the Medical Board of California and speak to a real person. Perhaps Jeremy Sampson had accidentally been dropped from the online directory.

Samantha phoned me the next day. Jackpot. The clerk at the medical board had found Jeremy Sampson immediately. She gave Samantha a work phone number for Dr. Sampson in Florida, at the State Department of Epidemiology. “It’s great. It’s great. It’s great!” Samantha trilled to me on the phone. “This is amazing. This is him. It has got to be him. It’s him. My God, the probability of this happening is so slim. . . .”

I asked her about the state agency he worked for. Samantha sounded a little dubious. “It doesn’t sound like something someone of his accomplishments would be doing.” Then she laughed at herself. “I have this dream, this idealized vision of what he is, and I know he can’t possibly live up to it.”

Julianna and I had agreed that she would make the first contact with Jeremy. We didn’t want to spook him, which a call from me or Samantha surely would. I passed on Jeremy’s phone number to Julianna. While we waited for her to call, I did a little more research on Jeremy Sampson. Now that I knew who the right guy was, it was easy to track him in online databases. I turned up some troubling stuff. He was involved in several lawsuits. He had had some minor run-ins with the authorities.

I didn’t tell Samantha about most of this; I didn’t want to alarm her. What little I did tell her bugged her, but not too much. She was eager to believe the best of him.

She told her son that Donor Coral had been found. Alton was pleased but cautious, Samantha said. He didn’t know what to expect. He was curious about Jeremy’s family history, but he definitely didn’t want ‘some kind of weird relationship.’ ” And he definitely didn’t start talking about Jeremy Sampson as his “dad.”

Samantha and Alton wondered how to approach Jeremy. They agreed that Alton should write a letter and send a picture. First, Alton agonized over how to address it: “Dear Coral” or “Dear Jeremy” or even “Dear Mr. Sampson.”

Then he wondered what to write. “What the fuck do you say to someone like this? What do you say to him?” he asked his mom. They were both baffled. They were in a new world. There was no guidebook on how to meet your donor dad. “None of us has role models for this, it is unknown,” Samantha told me. “We are on the edge of human feelings.”

By now, Julianna had called Jeremy Sampson, and he had returned her phone message. He had been “ecstatic,” Julianna reported, and wanted to know everything about Alton. He had offered to fly to Boston immediately, but Julianna had encouraged him to hold his horses. Julianna talked to Samantha and told her more about Jeremy. What Julianna said reassured Samantha. Jeremy and Alton were very similar, to go by Julianna’s description. “He reminds me of my son in so many ways,” Samantha told me after her conversation with Julianna. According to Julianna, Samantha said, “Jeremy is independent and creative. He does not care about what others think about him. He is often quiet and thoughtful and likes to assess a situation before he speaks.” Samantha and I debated about whether we should also tell Tom that we had found his father. We decided to wait a little more. We thought we should let Jeremy adjust to one new son before springing a second son—and a grandson—on him.

In early July, a week after we found him, Jeremy called Samantha at home. They talked for almost two hours. Jeremy was fascinated with Alton. He asked lots of questions. The parallels between Alton and Jeremy’s relatives flabbergasted Samantha. Alton played piano; Jeremy’s mother had been a professional pianist. Alton was an aspiring marine biologist; Jeremy’s father and grandfather were both celebrated marine biologists. Alton got on the phone for a few minutes, too. He and Jeremy compared likes and dislikes. Jeremy liked chess; so did Alton. Jeremy loved bike riding; Alton, too. They both preferred Russian composers to Germans. They exchanged photos by e-mail right afterward: they looked a lot alike, and Jeremy swore that Alton was a dead ringer for himself at sixteen. They made plans for Jeremy to fly up to Boston in August.

Samantha gave me the download the next day. “At the end of our telephone conversation, he referred to ‘our boy.’ I
loved
that. I never never never thought I would hear that expression.”

Samantha was happy and stunned. Alton was dumbfounded. He told Samantha that it was “too much to grok.” He wondered what in his life belonged just to him and what was programmed into his DNA. Marine biology—maybe that was a coincidence. But what about marine biology plus piano plus chess plus bikes plus Rachmaninoff? Alton posted cryptic notes on his blog. One began, “WhatamI?”

Samantha and Julianna kept me away from Jeremy. He didn’t want to talk to a reporter yet. I wrote him a note through Samantha, assuring him that I wouldn’t reveal his identity. Finally he wrote me back a letter and an e-mail. He said he was happy to talk to me. We made a phone date. From the moment he started speaking, I got curious vibes off Jeremy. He was undeniably sweet and friendly. He was admirably curious about his sperm bank kids. But his manner was vague and his conversation meandering.

I asked him about himself. He told me he had wanted a big family ever since he was a teenager. “Some people want fame and fortune. I wanted a lot of kids.” Then he told me how many kids he had—just by his wives and girlfriends, not counting sperm banks: “about X kids with Y different women” was how he put it. To protect his identity, I can’t reveal what X and Y were, but suffice it to say that X was an extremely high number, and Y wasn’t small, either.

Jeremy had also been an avid sperm donor, he said. He had contributed to the Repository and two other banks. He was interested in meeting
all
of his sperm bank children. (In his letter to me, he had written, “Even a crocodile takes an interest in recognizing and protecting its offspring. Shouldn’t a human being be interested in doing more than this?”) He said he had stopped donating to sperm banks only because he had gotten distracted by real women. “I was involved with two women at the same time. There was not a lot of sperm left over.”

I asked how he had managed to qualify for the Nobel sperm bank, since he had only been a young medical student at the time. “I was interested in Mensa. I had just broken up with my first wife, so I thought maybe I should follow up to try and get an intelligent wife or girlfriend. So I was reading about Mensa, and I must have seen something about the Nobel sperm bank. I was curious and I called them.”

When the people there had interviewed him, he said, he had mentioned various distinguished ancestors and told them his IQ was 160. Had they asked for the IQ test results? No, he said.

“Is your IQ 160?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I never took an IQ test. I told them the number I thought they would want to hear.”

I knew the Repository had struggled for donors, but this was incredible. It had accepted a “genius” donor based on an invented IQ score.

Jeremy and I struck up a friendly e-mail correspondence. Despite his profligate breeding, I liked him. Partly I liked him because he was unembarrassed. He talked straightforwardly about the sexual aspect of donating sperm. He mentioned that he had even seduced women at sperm banks, recounting this disconcerting story:

“Once, when I arrived at a sperm bank, another sperm donor was arriving at the same time. He had a cast on one of his arms, so I said to myself, ‘This guy is going to need some help getting sperm into a cup.’ At that time, there were two attractive young women working at the sperm bank. I think they were college girls—premed students, most likely.

“For purposes of anonymity, let’s call them ‘Nancy’ and ‘Susan.’ The four of us were standing there, so I said to the other sperm bank donor, ‘I’ll flip a coin, if it’s heads, you get Nancy, and I get Susan to help me . . . if tails, I’ll take Nancy and you get Susan.’ Well, I flipped the coin, and I got Nancy. I took her with me into the examination room, where I was expected to masturbate to put sperm into a cup. I put my arms around her, and she blushed a beet red color and ran out of the examination room.

“I guess she was sort of innocent in matters of male sexuality. To this day, I don’t know what happened between the other donor and Susan. Maybe the cast was not a real cast for a real arm injury but simply something that he wore so that he could get a cute female sperm bank employee to help him get sperm into the cup?

“Actually, at one of the sperm banks I did end up having a lighthearted sexual affair with one of the female employees that worked at the sperm bank. I say ‘lighthearted’ because although we were good friends, we were never madly in love with one another. It was more of a casual, sporadic, on-again/off-again sort of a relationship. Let’s just say that she was very talented with her hands and I was able to donate sperm without my masturbating at all.”

After her initial euphoria about Jeremy Sampson waned, Samantha began to worry about him. Jeremy had told her immediately about his many children, figuring she would find out about them eventually. She wanted to think that his greed to breed was harmless, but the more she learned, the more it bothered her. Jeremy warned her that if Alton ever wanted to marry another sperm bank child, they should make sure to get DNA tests. This disturbed her: Did he have that many DI kids, too? Some of Jeremy’s relatives called Samantha to welcome her to the family, but also to tell her stories about him. They claimed he failed to support many of his kids financially. According to them, he had poor relationships with some of the children and no relationship with others. He was a reproductive opportunist, they said: he bred when he chose and left the parental responsibility to someone else. Samantha also learned that much of what she had been told about his family’s accomplishments had been exaggerated.

Her correspondence with Jeremy soon grew sour and suspicious. Jeremy had been a gift, but already he felt like a curse. Every time Samantha learned something else unpleasant about Jeremy, he tried to brush it off, she thought. His imperturbability alarmed her. She wondered how he could be so unbothered by his chaotic life. Samantha and Alton started researching personality disorders on the Internet: Was there a condition that would cause someone to breed so indiscriminately?

I was asking myself the same question. Jeremy was the fourth Repository donor I had met who practiced this kind of reproductive excess. I had started to think of these guys as The Inseminators. All four had volunteered for the Repository, which wasn’t surprising. If you have a compulsion to breed, of course you’d offer yourself to sperm banks. Two of the four—including Michael, the Nobelist’s son—had just gone to sperm banks but had not fathered their own kids. This seemed egomaniacal—though not irresponsible—behavior. But two of them—Jeremy and another guy—had fathered both sperm bank kids and lots of their own. Jeremy and the other guy relied on the wives and girlfriends to do the work of raising their children. They seemed to believe that their genetic contribution was gift enough for the child. It occured to me that I might have stumbled on a new disorder: Onan meets Don Quixote meets Cheaper by the Dozen. I called some psychologists who specialized in sexual pathology to ask them if they had ever heard of men behaving this way. They hadn’t and were intrigued. A couple of the psychologists characterized this compulsion to father children as an extreme form of narcissism. This kind of Darwinian self-involvement was a new phenomenon, they thought. Until recently, men were constrained in their breeding by the number of women they could seduce. No longer. Sperm banks allowed the Inseminators to reproduce without limit.

By mid-July, Samantha had begun to fear what would happen if Jeremy met Alton. Alton wasn’t too keen on the idea, either. They decided to cancel the meeting. “My main concern is to protect my son,” Samantha told me. When she recalled how Jeremy had said “our boy,” it now infuriated her. Samantha wasn’t brokenhearted. She was too angry to be brokenhearted. A so-called genius sperm bank, a four-year search, and
this guy
was the prize?

Samantha avoided Jeremy’s e-mails for a few weeks. Finally she told him, “We are not going to see you.”

Jeremy replied quickly, trying to provoke Samantha into changing her mind:

Dear Samantha:

The only information you have about me is hearsay from third parties, rumors, and innuendo (and perhaps some tall-tales or lies).

(Also, of course, you have my respectful and friendly e-mails to you, and we did speak once or twice on the phone, in a friendly and non-confrontational manner, if I remember correctly.)

What information are you using to base your decisions on? Did I say or do something to offend you or upset you?

When I was sixteen, my mother didn’t try to tell me who to meet with and who not to meet with. She didn’t tell me who to correspond with and who not to. . . . She never made any comments or suggestions about people that she didn’t even know firsthand.

How long do you intend to “protect” Alton? Until he’s eighteen? Until he’s twenty-two? Until he’s thirty?

After this e-mail, Jeremy proceeded as though nothing had happened, as though Samantha hadn’t rebuffed him. He offered Alton the gift of a car, his old Saab. Jeremy told me he would visit Boston in August as planned. When I mentioned that to Samantha, she was incensed. She told him she and Alton would be away, no matter when he came. Samantha also told him to stop sending them e-mail, because she and Alton didn’t want to hear from him anymore. Jeremy kept e-mailing anyway. Alton installed a block on his inbox. If Jeremy sent him mail, the autoblock bounced it with the reply “This message has been automatically deleted.” Samantha put the block on her inbox, too. Samantha, whose e-mails had been all exclamation points and glee two weeks before, now signed her messages to me “Grrr.”