Donorboy (2 page)

He left me a note. It said, “Rosalind—Bought food. Will microwave one organic burrito of your choice in exchange for five words. Think it over.”

I've got his five words right here.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Five words

Dear Rosalind:

Well, I guess Did You Fuck My Mom is, in fact, five words. I hope you enjoyed the burrito. Mine was cold in the middle.

So listen. Or, rather, read. I have taken your five words as an invitation to tell you some stuff about me. I'm going to send you something every day at my lunch hour. Maybe you'll write me back sometime. Maybe you won't. Maybe you'll talk to me. Maybe you won't. In any case, I hope you will at least read what I write to you and not delete it. I guess I don't know if you will or not.

Okay, so I am sorry that I was choking on black beans and soy cheese in a whole-wheat tortilla when you asked your question and so didn't get to answer it. My standard comeback when somebody swears unexpectedly … well, never mind. Anyway, I thought about getting indignant, like what happens between two adults is none of your business, blah blah, but it is the beginning of your life we're talking about, so I guess the question is fair.

Sorry I am going on at length and still not answering the question. This is what lawyers do, I suppose.

Anyway, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. (That's a Bill Clinton joke, but maybe you are too young to get it. That is a kind of scary thought to me. But anyway.)

Here's the deal: I took the Red Line to the Green Line, got off at Brookline Village, walked into this eight-story glass box of a building, took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked into Fertility Solutions, suite 416. I went by myself, though I had tried to get Marcia, who was my girlfriend at the time, to go with me. (This little fact becomes important later. Bear with me.)

I signed in with the receptionist, and then a nurse, a heavy, fiftyish blond woman who sported that olfactory treat of too much perfume covering up cigarette smoke, and had gold rings on every finger and fingernails that were probably an inch and a half long and a name tag that said “Angela” escorted me to the donation room and handed me a clear plastic cup with a blue lid. I placed my donation in the cup and returned the cup to Angela, which was probably the most embarrassing moment of my life up to that point. I don't know exactly what process followed, but a month later, Sandy called to tell me that Eva was pregnant. I was jumping up and down I was so happy. Marcia was there, and she was less happy.

So that is how you were conceived. I guess it's not that much of a story, in the end. But since I am your father, sort of, I mean, biologically definitely, but anyway, I think it is my parental responsibility to bore you with stories. So you didn't ask, but I'm going to tell you anyway about how I met your moms. I know that after my mom died I liked hearing stories about her. Except when I didn't, and then I wanted to throttle the stupid insensitive jackass who was trying to tell me some stupid story about my mom that was more about him anyway.

I guess if I'm honest, those are the kind of stories I have to offer. Like I said, you can read them or not. But I hope you do.

Love,

Sean

Dear stupid grief journal that seems unfortunately to be my only friend these days:

Well, well, well, Sasha has stopped with the IM, and she is pretty much not talking to me at school anymore, which is probably because I am likely to bite her head off about something stupid mostly because I hate her for having parents, which is not really her fault, and at lunch the other day I had to leave when stupid Sara started bitching about “I hate my mom, blah blah.” I hate Sara's mom too, I mean, I get why she hates her mom, her mom is a total nightmare, but still it's better …

I don't know. I'd say the same thing if I was her, and then I probably wouldn't notice if the girl whose two moms just got crushed by foodstuffs got up and ran to the bathroom and cried while some druggie girl smoked Marlboros in the next stall.

I don't know what her name is, but she offered me a smoke, and I almost took one because what the hell, it's not like I have to worry about what Mom would say, or how Mommy would launch into how Grandpa Ed died of lung cancer. Which, I mean, if you look at it, she died with clean lungs, but not smoking didn't keep her alive. Nothing keeps you safe ever, so why bother trying to stay safe ever, why do anything to stay alive when you could die today?

I am not crying. I don't know, O, Grief Journal (we read that stupid poem where he goes “Go to it, O Jazzmen” in English class, and it was the dumbest, but I do kind of like that O, and I can't very well say O, Denise, since Denise told me she's never going to read this, Okay Denise, whatever, maybe I'll just stop writing it then.)

But then who am I going to talk to? Sasha? Kristen? Sara? They're all, I have to go do homework so I get into Harvard early decision, and I'm all I stopped doing math homework because my mom died and so did my mommy and geometry seems pretty unimportant next to that, I'm sure even Ms. Weymouth would agree. Prove these triangles congruent: 1. Axiom, life sucks. 2. Fuck you. 3. Triangles are congruent. Maybe I could talk to that druggie girl in the bathroom, which is I mean, I guess if you are smoking Marlboros in the bathroom something's gotta be wrong with you, and something's wrong with me too, and it was nice how she offered me a smoke even though smelling like shit probably wouldn't have helped my day any, but she didn't want to talk and relate, she didn't want to distract me, she just offered me a Marlboro, and those are like eight bucks a pack or something, so it meant something for her to offer me one.

I'm still not crying. I guess that's what I wished for. But I don't feel anything right now. That's better than feeling bad, I guess. I remember that girl I was, who hung out with Sasha and Kate and Sara and Kristen and thought about stupid stuff and cared about stupid stuff and worried sometimes if she would be gay like her moms, which I guess wouldn't be so terrible, but now who cares? Why even bother being gay, why bother not being gay, why bother with anything. Why bother eating. Because I'm fucking starving and it turns out I really like those burritos Sean bought.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Why me?

Dear Rosalind:

Don't worry, I don't mean why me as in “Why me? Why me?” which is a Nancy Kerrigan joke you almost certainly don't get unless you were following the Olympics closely at the age of three.

That is to say, this is not an e-mail about why bad things happen to good people, or to anybody, or anything. Did anybody tell you God has a plan? They used to tell me that.

But, as I said, this is, rather, an e-mail that will try to explain a little bit about why I am your father, or why Sandy and Eva picked me to be their donor.

It was 1987. I had just finished my first year of college in Boston, and I didn't feel like going home to Philadelphia. This was … well, my dad was a bartender, smoked a lot of weed, and was really more of a roommate to me than any kind of parent, and a kind of messy and annoying one to boot. I suppose a lot of guys my age would have enjoyed that situation, but I figured if I wanted a bartender roommate, I could probably find one on campus who (a) didn't smoke and aggravate my asthma, and (b) didn't listen to Emerson, Lake and Palmer obsessively and give weekly lectures on the underappreciated genius of the
Tarkus
album.

So I started checking the bulletin board at the student union for sublets, and ended up on the first floor of a house right on a busy traffic rotary, living, as luck would have it, with a guy who worked as a bouncer at a bar in Ball Square. My roommate, Dave, didn't smoke and owned no recordings by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, his taste running more to Loverboy and Triumph. This was not too great in my opinion either, but he worked all night and slept all day, whereas I had to get up at six every morning, so we basically never saw each other. That proved to be the basis of a friendship that endures to this day, which actually appears quite strange when I see it written down.

I found a summer job at a different university across town as a kind of camp counselor at Future Dreams, which was basically summer school for middle-schoolers from the Boston Public Schools. I led most of the group activities, supervised the homework time, organized the Friday field trips (incredible pain in the ass), and led the Friday field trips (usually very fun). Sandy worked as a teacher in that program. I should tell you that the students really liked her. They used to complain to me about everybody else, and they never had a bad thing to say about Sandy. This is doubly impressive because they always made it clear that her class was hard and they thought she gave too much homework. Also, she had this spiky short hair and wore a pink triangle pin all the time (which is what they had before the rainbow flags, but maybe you know that). I probably don't have to tell you that middle-schoolers are not the most tolerant people on earth, but they never made fun of her or even said a word about her being a lesbian. I didn't get this at the time, but of course that meant that they really liked and respected her.

I hope my talking about your mom is not going to bum you out. I can certainly stick to talking mostly about myself if you prefer. Blink once for yes, twice for no. I'm kidding. Sort of.

At the end of the summer I got invited to the first of the annual end-of-summer blowouts, which I assume they kept having after you were born, but I guess I don't really know. I wanted to go, but I was a little afraid. I was young and it was, remember, 1987. So pretty much everything I knew about anybody gay came from
Three's Company
, where Jack wasn't even really gay but just pretended to be. Do you even have any idea what I'm talking about? I guess if Sandy and Eva had cable you might have seen an old episode sometime.

Sandy was the first avowedly non-heterosexual person I had ever known, and though I liked her, I was kind of afraid of her in the way I was afraid of Jehovah's Witnesses. Not that I thought she was going to knock on my door and try to convert me, but just that I thought she belonged to a strange world I knew nothing about whose members might possibly hate me.

When I got to the party, Sandy introduced me to Eva, and I pretty much lost all power of speech. Again, I don't know how much you know about
Single Dads Club
or Eva's years as Tracey—it seemed like it was not something she really obsessed about even at the time, so maybe they never even mentioned it. In any case, I had had a terrible crush on your mom, Eva, when she was on
Single Dads Club
during my sixth- and seventh-grade years.

Just in case you don't know the basic outline, Jim the skinny dad and Gary the fat dad had to room together with Jim's wisecracking ten-year-old boy and Gary's ostensibly teen daughter (actually a 21-year-old Eva at the series' beginning). Hilarity and a large number of Very Special Episodes ensued. Tracey gets drunk. Tracey's best friend attempts suicide.

There's really no explaining why I was obsessed with this particular girl on this particular sitcom—it was not any better or worse than any of the other crap on TV at the time—maybe it was just that it was on on Wednesday nights, when I usually needed a boost because the weekend was coming, which, when your dad's a bartender, is not something you look forward to. Whatever the case, I watched it religiously for both seasons it was on, and I was left hanging for life about whether Tracey was going to go backpack across Europe with her hippie boyfriend or go to the University of Michigan like her dad wanted her to.

They never aired the continuation of the “to be continued” episode about Tracey's big decision. I turned on the TV the following Wednesday, and
Love, Sidney
or
The Fall Guy
or
The Facts of Life
or something was on, and I never found out what happened to Tracey.

So, as I said, I met Eva, and my brain immediately liquefied. Because she was Tracey. Is this icky? Too much information? I guess most people kind of take it for granted that their fathers had crushes on their mothers, but I accept that this is new and possibly gross information for you, so I will skip ahead.

It was a really fun party, and like about twenty other people there, I ended up spending the night. (How much am I supposed to admit about my alcohol consumption? Well, I suppose if we ever establish any kind of relationship at all, it will probably not be based on your belief that I am some all-knowing perfect sage, so I might as well just tell the truth and hope my honesty scores some points. I got completely hammered.)

And then I remember waking up with an elf wielding Mjolnir, the Mighty Hammer of Thor, beating at my skull from the inside. (That is both a comic-book joke, which I assume you don't get but made anyway, and a hangover joke, which I sincerely hope you don't get.) I was on the couch. Apparently this was lucky, as I had to step over several people sleeping on the floor on my way to the bathroom. Where I vomited.

I washed my face, swished some water in my mouth, and staggered into the kitchen. And then I began to clean. Luckily I was the first one up, so I didn't have to explain about how a morning-after party scene Activates My Childhood Issues, since, as I said, Dad was a bartender. Saturday nights when I was in middle school I would stay up and watch
Saturday Night Live
and then go to bed. He would return a few hours later, occasionally with coworkers, but more often with some drunken woman he had picked up at work. When I got up on Sunday morning, I cleaned up the beer cans, Chinese-food containers, pizza boxes, joints, and whatever other detritus covered the living room floor before I even had my first bite of Honeycomb.

This was pretty much the routine up until I left for college, and would probably be the routine now, except, of course, that I am no longer there to clean and Dad is getting a little long in the tooth and has that foggy idiocy of the long-term cannabis addict that the ladies may not find as beguiling now as they did in 1980. But, to be fair, I don't actually know. I don't go to Philadelphia very often.