Down For the Sperm Count

I slammed on the brakes a little too hard. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the dixie cup filled with my seminal fluid, gliding across the passenger side seat like a hockey puck soaring towards a goal. I reached out and grabbed it, saving my sperm from certain suicide, and held it close to my chest, as if protecting it from predators.

"We're almost there," I whispered to my genetic material. "Just stay calm. Don't die on me, you understand? Don't you die on me!"



I put the car back into drive and moved slowly down the highway. I was going at least 10 miles under the posted speed limit, much to the consternation of every other driver on the road. But I wasn't concerned with their uppity impatience. They could either slow down or get the hell out of my way. Every streetlight and stop sign, every pothole and sharp left turn and unexpected incline, held the potential for disaster. If I stopped paying attention for even a minute, it might result in my jism being splattered against the front windshield, like a teenage drunk's brains on prom night, and then we'd have to start this whole excruciating process over again.

I looked down at the directions. It'd made so much sense when I was copying it from Googlemaps, but now it looked hopelessly complicated, as indecipherable as hieroglyphics. I glanced at my watch. Just twenty-four more minutes and it'd be too late.

"Dammit, Spitznagel" I muttered. "You wouldn't be in this mess if you just jerked off at the hospital like a normal person."

KEEP ON READIN'! IF YOU DON'T DO IT FOR ME, DO IT FOR THE UNBORN CHILDREN.

That had been the Dame's argument. She thought I was making things unnecessarily complicated. "Just go to the clinic and get it over with," she told me. "Why is this such a big deal? The man I married wouldn't be freaked out by this. He'd masturbate in a public building whether somebody asked him to or not."

She knew how to sweet-talk me. And as usual, she was right. When she met me, I was a masturbation machine. I'd spank it three or four times before breakfast. I could rub one out while washing dishes or doing laundry. I was the guy who thought the dressing room of a Gap was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Even in my old age, on the downslide to 40, I relished the idea of doing something really inappropriate and dirty in public. Sure, it was for medical reasons, but there's something deliciously filthy about walking into a big corporate-looking building and saying to the receptionist, "Hello. I have a one o'clock appointment. For what, you ask? I believe the Spanish called it una puñeta." Even better if she was one of those medical professionals who couldn't be fazed. Nothing is quite so exhilarating as finding the perfect licentious comment to make somebody blush.

"I'm sorry," I imagined whispering to her, peeking out from whatever self-pleasuring barracks they'd assigned me. "I don't mean to be a bother, but do you have any German anal fisting videos? That's the only thing that'll do it for me."

That may've been good fun at one point in my life, but I'm long past such childish antics. At least in my masturbatory habits, I've settled into a comfortable rut. I have a routine that works for me, and I don't see any good reason to change it. I have my favorite chair, in my favorite rarely visited room of the apartment. It's a controlled environment. I know how to close the curtains just enough to get plenty of natural sunlight without sharing too much with the neighbors. I know the exact frequency of the hall creaks so nobody can sneak up on me. I have my own collection of vintage 80s porn, and watching it is as familiar and uncomplicated as drunk-dialing an ex-girlfriend.

But I knew it wasn't just laziness keeping me from public onanism. Something about this whole procedure made me nervous. This wasn't like when I was 23 and my roommate tried to convince me that we should donate sperm, as it was less personally demeaning than a 9-to-5 day job and would bring in a salary for an activity we were doing anyway. This was the sexual equivalent of a colonoscopy. The only good news was a lack of bad news. It's not like the doctor would come back with my results and say, "Wow, we knew you were fertile, but we had no idea how fertile. You've got mutant sperm, m'boy. The lab technicians got a little pregnant just by handling it. Hope your wife is ready for quintuplets, and that's if she's on the pill and you're wearing two condoms."

I wasn't as nervous as I could've been. I had reason to believe my boys could swim. At least a few times in my past, I'd been involved in tense conversations that began "Well what are we going to do now?" But sperm changes as you get older. When I was in my 20s, I could've hit a lamp across the room. But these days, my spooge isn't in as much of a hurry. It takes its time, like a old person getting on public transportation.

There was a lot of pressure riding on one ejaculation. If my sample wasn't sufficiently spermy — dancing across a petri dish and doing jazz hands in some Bob Fosse DNA stage spectacular — I'd have to wait another two weeks to get tested again. The pressure was definitely on. What if the hospital's porn was just a basket of National Geographics? Or the nurse kept knocking and saying, "Everything okay in there?" I couldn't perform under those conditions. If I managed to come at all, my sperm would be begrudging and hostile, like teenagers being herded out of a public park.



None of this would have been a problem if the closest fertility clinic wasn't a goddamn hour's drive away. Living in northern Florida has brought its fair share of inconveniences — no culture to speak of, no exotic cuisine that doesn't come from a shrimp boat, and a political climate that could best be described as "no fat chicks" — but this was the first time I was genuinely surprised by how far the state was willing to go to make my life difficult.

The first challenge was just finding a clinic that offered male fertility testing. No matter how many times I did it, it was never an easy phone call. Why, I wondered, did every receptionist have to be female, and speak with the squeaky voice of a prepubescent? And I was never able to just come right out and ask for what I wanted. I just hinted at it, hoping they'd understand and finish my sentence for me.

"Do you test, uh... you know."

"No, I'm afraid I don't," the receptionist usually said. "How can we help you?"

"The, uh, fluid."

"You mean blood? Yes, we do a variety of blood tests."

"No, no, the other fluid. The man liquid."

"I'm sorry, sir, I have no idea what you're talking about."

Context means a lot when it comes to discussing sperm with strangers. In a social situation, I'd have no problem talking loudly and unabashedly about my giggle juice. But when speaking with somebody who will soon be evaluating my seminal bumper crop, I turn into Miss Manners. I assumed that "semen" was the proper medical term, but I worried that its obviousness might be considered crude. "Seed" maybe? Or was that too biblical? "Where shall I spill my seed?" "Load" seemed suitably vague, but possibly too vague. Would it make sense if not accompanied by the prefix "blow my"? What's left? Baby batter? Jizzle? Man-jam? Personally, I thought "fromage" was the best option. It just sounds classy, like it should be served with chianti.

When I finally mustered the courage to be specific about which fluid I wanted put under a microscope, the majority of them politely said no. A few seemed shocked that I would even suggest such a thing, which I found confusing and a little off-putting. "Oh come on," I wanted to scream back at them. "I'm not asking to donate in the lobby. Just point me towards the nearest janitor's closet."

The real head-scratchers, though, were the clinics that claimed they only offered fertility testing for their post-vasectomy patients.

"Well, can't you just do the test for somebody who wants to be fertile?" I asked.

"It doesn't work like that," they said curtly.

"But it's the same test, isn't it? The only difference is I'll still have my balls."

"Sir, no, you don't understand..."

"Okay, how about this?" I suggested. "I pay for the vasectomy but don't actually get it. It'll be our little secret. Then will you give me a fertility test?"

"No, I'm sorry."

"Okay, okay, fine. Just out of curiosity, do you only give mammograms to women who've had their breasts removed?"

After days of calling every number in the phone book, I finally located a clinic that didn't treat me like a pervert asking to jerk off in the bushes while watching their daughter shower. The only snag was that the clinic was an hour away. Exactly an hour if I didn't hit traffic, followed the directions perfectly, and let the car roll into neutral rather than parking. The hour rule was extremely important, they kept reminding me, to ensure the best motility and morphology of my sample. After an hour, it'd be as useful as dried spunk in a tube sock.

"You can always do it here," the receptionist suggested.

"I guess so," I half-whispered. "Do you have any midget bondage porn?"

"Excuse me?"

"I think I'll take my chances at home."

Being on a strict timetable takes the eroticism out of masturbation. I'd made an appointment with the clinic to drop off my sperm at 3pm, which meant I'd need to ejaculate exactly at 2pm, not a moment earlier or later. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on sexy thoughts, but the Jeopardy theme kept interrupting, reminding me that the clock was ticking. When I finished, the Dame was waiting for me outside, holding up the car keys and directing me towards the closest exit.

"Move, move, move!" she hollered, like I was a marathon runner in the final stretch.

"You know what they should call this?" I asked as she pushed me into the car. "The Sperminball Run."

She said nothing, just forced a smile and placed the keys gently into my hands.

"You get it?" I persisted. "Like the movie Cannonball Run? But it's Sperminball instead of Cannonball. Sperm-in-balls. It's a race to get my sperm to the clinic before anybody else. Funny, right?"

"What are you, six years old? Just drive!"

That was... oh god, 40, 45 minutes ago? It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't asked our doctor nearly enough questions. For the long car ride over to the clinic, were there any special instructions on keeping my sperm extra... breedy? Should I be blowing on it or something? Maybe cracking open a window like it was a dog being left in a grocery store parking lot? Was I supposed to be tapping on the side of the cup to encourage air flow and circulation, or talking to it just to let it know this wasn't another masturbatory hyjink and it wasn't about to be flushed down the toilet in a Viking funeral of crumpled kleenex?

And what about the temperature? Should my sperm be warm or cold, or somewhere in between? I cranked the air conditioning as high as it would go. It seemed to make sense; internal organs being transported between hospitals are usually stored in coolers filled with ice, right? But the more I thought about it, the more illogical it seemed. Didn't sperm prefer an environment that's warm and wet, like a vagina? It's not like you could increase your chances of getting pregnant by icing down the cooter. Semen, if given the choice, was more comfortable cozying up to a balmy, hospitable ovum or hanging out in a toasty pair of testicles than being dunked in an ice bucket.

"What do you want from me?" I yelled at the sperm, instantly regretting that I was speaking to it like something with ears and a personality. "I'm trying to do what's right here! We just want a fucking baby! Tell us what it's gonna take to turn you into a baby!"

It surprised me to hear that word coming out of my mouth. "Baby." Seriously? I wanted a baby? I was still getting used to the idea. For as long as I'd known the Dame, we were the couple that opted for culture over reproduction. We enjoyed children, but we enjoyed them ironically. We had no interest in kids who were just blandly adorable or precocious. We gravitated towards those children with an adult's grasp of creative profanity. Any cherub can be taught to regurgitate words like "fuck" — demonstrating the cerebral prowess of a parrot is nothing to brag about — but it takes a special adolescent intellect to use a word like "twunt" or "cock-nuggets" or "fuckaluckadingdong" and give it context.

But while we could admire children from afar, that didn't mean we wanted one of our own. We avoided breeding for generally the same reasons we recycled or drove a hybrid. Because given the crappy condition of the planet, it was really the only unselfish choice.

"But don't you just love children?" people would ask when we admitted our complete lack of interest in propagating the species.

I've never understood that question. Were they honestly asking if I had unconditional affection for children in general? All children? I try to take human beings — all living creatures, really — on a case-by-case basis. I don't "love" any large group of people. Claiming to love all children makes as much sense as saying, "I love Puerto Ricans." Really? For me, that seems like a gross generalization that can be easily disproven just by being in the same room with more than three Puerto Ricans. And the same logic applies to children. Some children are so goddamn cute that I want to steal them away from their parents and take them home and dress them up like characters from a Humphrey Bogart movie. And some children, well, some children are assholes. And I'd say as much to their face.

But this argument falls on deaf ears for many people. Or at least people who have children of their own, and are unwilling or unable to concede the possibility that their babies are anything but a precious gift straight from heaven. I've had friends — perfectly intelligent, creative, rational friends — who, after becoming parents, have thought it reasonable to ask me, while I'm visiting them for the first time post-birth, whether I'd enjoy bathing their child.

"It'll be fun," my friend Brendan asked, holding out his baby like it was a kilo of coke and I was Gram Parsons.

I followed him into the bathroom of his Brooklyn apartment, because I assumed his offer was just some brilliantly subtle gag that I hadn't figured out yet. My old friend, the man who once drank whiskey like it was tap water and argued eloquently that the Marquis de Sade was an underrated satirist, couldn't seriously be asking me to wash his baby. But then I watched him roll up his sleeves and hand me a wet sponge, his face devoid of a sardonic sneer.

"Don't be afraid to really dig in around his toes," Brendan said. "That's where most of the dirt hides."

I just stared at him, slack-jawed, like Caesar at Brutus. Except instead of being stabbed with a knife, I was being stabbed with a naked baby.

I closed my eyes and scrubbed, but not with any real effort. I scrubbed like a teenager washing dishes at a minimum wage job; with just enough enthusiasm to keep the boss satisfied, but secretly counting the minutes until his next cigarette break. I barely said a word to Brendan during the entire horrible ordeal. I didn't know what I could say to him that wouldn't come out sounding cruel. It took every ounce of strength not to scream, "Are you fucking kidding me? I drive out to Brooklyn to see your ass and you hand me your filthy fucking baby and tell me to give it a bath? Dog owners aren't this presumptuous! They'd never hand you a hose and a sponge and say, 'Wanna give Whiskers a bath out in the yard?' You know why they don't do that? Because it's fucking insane! Wash your own goddamn baby, you fucking freak!"

(To read Part Two, go here.)