Fraud (21 page)

Not ready to go back there just yet, I hop the train to Ebisu, Tokyo’s youth Mecca ascendant. The holdup at the door to Milk, one of the city’s most popular clubs, is not so management can verify ID, frisk for weapons, or confiscate drugs. It is due to the many umbrellas being checked by the young,
young
crowd. Sporting my natural hair color and not wearing white-framed Lina Wertmuller sunglasses makes me stand out almost as much as my being one of the only Westerners on line, not to mention being a good ten years older than everyone else. Upon entering, a nineteen-year-old girl in baby barrettes, a T-shirt worn over a sweater, and orange canvas clam diggers presses something small and round into our palms. Ah, I think, holding the disk-shaped freebie, good old condoms. I look down and see that we have been handed not rubbers, but rather six plastic bookmarks printed with the prim slogan “Yes, I do, but not with you.”

Milk doesn’t seem all that much different from most clubs I’ve been to. It is loud, dark, crowded, underserviced by toilets. A Japanese thrash band plays, the lead singer adorably shirtless and screaming. Young men boil around like piranhas in the mosh pit. I am no more inclined to join them now than I was a decade ago, but I can always use a good bookmark.

Returning late to room
201
, I muster sufficient Japanese to say to the night clerk at the hotel, “My room is making me very sad. I would like to kill myself. May I have a different one tomorrow, facing the front, perhaps?” And so off to bed, feeling spoiled and venal. The room is quiet and dark, at least, the platform outside my window silent and closed for the night. I bless the fact that the city’s mass transit stops just after twelve, with the exception of one night a year, December
31
, when they run all night.

On New Year’s Eve the already mythically crowded Tokyo subways are exponentially more so. During normal rush hour the
tsukebe,
Tokyo’s storied subway
frotteurs,
can at least find enough space to get their grubby hands on the nether parts of some poor unsuspecting girl; on New Year’s Eve you literally cannot move. You just hope you’ve gotten on the same car as enough people going to the same stop as you; otherwise you will have to wait until the river of humanity decides to disembark.

Early on January
1,
1987
, my evening’s celebration concluded, the dawn of a new year breaking, I stood on just such a train. It was a function of how blitzed I was from the night’s revels, traveling from shrine to temple to club, drinking all the while, that I didn’t experience a complete agoraphobic attack. As we approached my stop, I looked over to my right. There, not eight feet away, was a young woman, jammed up facing a man about a head taller than she. He began that unmistakable wet-mouthed, lip-smacking, compulsive swallowing that indicates the impending need to vomit. His upper lip shone with perspiration, and his eyes were closed. The woman had nowhere to go—indeed, there was nothing she would be able to do until the train reached the station, and that might not be in sufficient time. If the first thing you do on the first day augurs the spirit and tone of your new year, this woman was in for a very bad
1987
. She began to cry.

In one of those vodka-pure moments of proof that laughter is often nothing more than anxious release—I, on the other hand, began to giggle uncontrollably. The joke was on me, of course, because I ended up having the shitty year.

The Hotel Alcyone, next stop on my ever-downward spiral, is scrupulously clean. Even the carpets in the elevator are changed daily, because like the panties from Bloomingdale’s
1970
s Forty Carrots heyday, they are printed with “Sunday, Monday,” and so on. My room is undeniably monastic, however. Small and Spartan, and again, while clean, it seems academic if one can’t actually distinguish between something that is dirty and something that merely looks dirty. But at under $
100
a night near the Ginza, it is an affordable, well-located bargain, if not a tad gloomy. Sitting on my bed before I go out for my last evening in Tokyo, I experience the first earth tremor of the trip. As much a feeling as a noise, a deep, all-encompassing, almost electric rumbling. It lasts only a very few seconds, but I think, How perfect to buy the farm here at the Hotel Alcyone, flattened and crushed, this sprung mattress with its Hollofil polyester bedspread my funeral bier.

Later that evening I eat roasted eel in the top-floor restaurant of a department store in Shinjuku. The restaurant is famous for its eel. The traditional accompaniment to
unagi
is green
sansho
(mountain pepper) powder. I have been warned that taking too much will make my “tongue go to sleep.” I take too much. It tastes of concentrated citrus peel with an intermittently forceful salty note and something green underneath, like hyssop. Sure enough, my lips start to buzz, my tongue and throat feel as if they are lined with Velcro. The sensory strangeness is amplified terrifyingly by the evening’s second earth tremor, stronger than the first and eight seconds long. Try it right now: sit for eight seconds and imagine the very ground shifting, unstable, threatening immediate and lethal liquefaction. But the eel is really delicious.

Close to midnight I find myself in a near empty plaza underneath an enormous outdoor television screen. I stand, rapt, among five or six homeless men and a small crowd of young people, their telephones quiet for the moment, as we watch an extended Nescafé commercial: a thrilling montage of people of various ages, races, and genders falling in love in fields, farmhouses, cafés, churches. “Open up!” sings the song, urging us to embrace the world in all its romantic, universal, caffeinated glory.

Perhaps “Open up” really means the ground will continue its tremors, forming fissures that widen and swallow whole this extraordinary, illusory city. God knows I once felt the specter of obliteration here before, a destruction from which I thought I’d never recover, and the ground hadn’t had to move an inch. For now, though, the only thing shaking is my two hundred-gram box of chocolate-covered almonds. I am becalmed by the sound that I have quite a few left.

I USED TO BANK HERE, BUT
THAT WAS LONG, LONG AGO

Hodgkin’s disease, the illness that sent me packing from Tokyo at the age of twenty-two, is a form of lymphatic cancer, common among young men in their twenties. Hodgkin’s is also highly curable. So highly curable, in fact, that I like to refer to it as the dilettante cancer.

An old Canadian joke bears telling here: A boss says to an underling, “I’m off to Sault Sainte Marie for the weekend.”

“Sault Sainte Marie?” asks the employee, incredulous. “But, boss, there are only whores and hockey players in Sault Sainte Marie.”

“My wife is from Sault Sainte Marie.”

“Oh. (
beat
) What position does she play?”

When I joke about Hodgkin’s being the cancer for boys who do things in half measures, it is invariably to someone whose husband or brother or son has just died from Hodgkin’s. I don’t mean to denigrate other survivors or less fortunate nonsurvivors. My inappropriate wisecrack only serves to prove a point about myself. On some level, despite the fact that I received both radiation and chemotherapy, I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled. Kinda been there, sorta done that. It has only recently occurred to me that perhaps I might stop glibly insisting that the cancer wasn’t real and the doctors popped me into an Easy-Bake Oven, where a forty-watt light bulb halted the metastasis in its tracks.

What remains, almost fourteen years after the fact? Four small tattoos, subcutaneous black dots, like compass points on my torso; near total numbness in the very tips of my fingers, as well as a palm-size area on my right inner thigh also without feeling; some dry mouth; and, most lastingly, three straws of my prechemotherapized sperm, in cold storage, somewhere in Toronto. Like millions of tiny Walt Disneys, they wait, frozen, until the day I will return and have them conjoined with some willing ovum and thereby fulfill their zygotic destiny, growing into children who will eventually go on to break my heart and not talk to me.

I’m not entirely sure I even want children of my own, although I’d like to keep my options open. Being of a certain class and living in Manhattan, I have been led to believe that my life is nothing but an embarrassment of options. Parenthood frequently comes late around these parts. Go to any playground on the Upper West Side, and you will find that most of the grown-ups are fortyish, and among the children there is an overrepresentation of fertility treatment–
enhanced sets of twins and adopted Chinese girls. Once, I watched as a twenty-eight-year-old mother arrived at the jungle gym with her toddler. Twenty-eight might even be considered late for a new mother elsewhere in these United States, but there she looked like some Appalachian child bride, ridiculously young for the burden of parenthood. Everybody was casting concerned glances her way, as if to ask, “Who is the brute who did this to you?”

So it’s more than a simple desire for kids—who can be fairly boring, truth be told. I just want to know where the sperm is. Easier said than done, as it turns out, because since that time, I have moved, my parents have moved, the sperm bank has moved, and the cancer hospital has moved. The traces have been thoroughly kicked over, which suits me fine. I’m not by nature terribly sentimental. I’m not a photo taker, I have no scrapbooks, I have attempted to never look back, until now.

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
1930
s through the
1950
s, 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
114
th 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 materialize. 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.