The future is now at fertility cryobank

“Since 1996, Growing Generations and its subsidiary companies have been committed to building families of choice through surrogacy, egg donation, and sperm donation.”

–Growing Generations, LLC, website

On a chez lounge upholstered with glittery silver plastic and graced by one pubic hair, I lay stroking myself, struggling to maintain an erection. A fluorescent tube sunk in the acoustic ceiling tiles tinged the room with a flickering green hue. Shadows shifted on the linoleum under the door, shadows cast by scrub-clad laboratory technicians waiting to scrutinize my ejaculate with their instruments and microscopes. The tap of shoes echoed through the corridor as one of them paced. They carried on a muffled conversation.

“What’s our status?” said one.

“We’re collecting,” said another.

The room was hardly an aphrodisiac, but I’d experienced worse. My impotence was the result of some kind of primordial anxiety. The lab coat people were like tired whores, waiting for me to come. Dropping my penis, I stood and began to pace, pants hanging open. I opened a drawer under the TV.

On top sat a DVD with an obscene title and a man wearing Zubaz pants and a crew cut devouring a penis. Next to that was a magazine graced by an oiled man with chiseled abs and one hand down his bulging boxer-briefs. I closed the drawer.

The other drawer contained what Giovanni had called the “heterosexual material.” I didn’t know what to expect, maybe an elephant butt-fucking a chicken with an underage Cambodian dominatrix in a vat of chocolate fondue. To my disappointment, the laboratory had kept with relatively conservative literature. Barely Legal was the most risqué title, featuring a teenage girl with peach-fuzzy loins. She was probably a runaway from Michigan, posing to feed her molester’s abandoned love child. I closed the drawer.

I lay back down on the sofa and meditated intensely on my surrogate mate. In my imagination she looked a lot like a cashier from a Palms grocery store with whom I’ve never spoken and never will. Two minutes later, still tugging away, I felt myself riding up the ramp, but it was forced. When finally I did point my meatus into the little plastic vial and discharge with a sigh, all that came out was clumpy, dry and unsubstantial. I looked down at my swimming chromosomes. “Go forth and multiply,” I said, and placed the vial in the pass-through and knocked twice.

Weeks before, I had seen an ad in a local weekly asking me to sell my seed to Fertility Cryobank, the sperm-bank division of Growing Generations, LLC, a child-manufacturing ring. Amid smiling faces and numbers with dollar signs, the ad said, “Make a Positive Difference in Someone’s Life.” Making a difference sounded appealing; I usually don’t. They paid $25 per ejaculation upfront, plus another $25 a few months later if the ejaculate survived. And what an easy way to secure my genetic legacy! What deadbeat father would hesitate at the opportunity to promise to never, ever interact with his multiple children and their mothers? The child wouldn’t even be mine, legally. I’d be crossed with various surrogates far and wide. Wealthy Los Angeles gays would raise my offspring. But they demanded high-quality genes. They had higher standards than an orthodox Jewess.

Thus the questionnaire, conducted online. It started with benign questions about my age and address. Then it moved into every detail of my health history and that of all my relatives. What color was my grandfather’s hair? What nations did I descend from? No, I had not been diagnosed with any of the 50 or 60 degenerative diseases listed. To my knowledge, neither had my ancestors. I was mostly ignorant as to the origin of my grandparents. Great-grandma was a heroin addict, though, and great-grandpa ditched his wife to join the Kraut-killing frenzy of 1918. My maternal grandfather died at 72 of heart failure. He worked for Douglas Aircraft before it was swallowed by the competition. My paternal grandfather was an abusive alcoholic, and his wife died at 60-something of cancer after a sedentary life. Who knows where my grandfather came from. He’s still alive, married to a witch in Redwood City. My maternal grandmother is 82 and there’s no sign that she’ll ever die.

Then the questionnaire began to insinuate the un-Constitutional idea that one’s material and social success are genetically predetermined. What were the highest levels of education achieved by my grandparents, my parents, and myself? How much money did they make? How much money did I make? Had I won any awards? Embarrassed, I listed myself as a “journalist,” an embellished title for an unemployed man, one with a pittance of income. No successful and self-respecting homosexual couple would want to raise a child of my legacy, I thought wanly. A self-respecting homosexual couple wanted the progeny of a tall, straight-toothed, clear-skinned mainlander with a graduate degree, high-paying job, emotional security, balanced psychology, and a high IQ, from an eminent and established family of similar people. What they would get instead was the progeny of a man masturbating desperately in a laboratory for $25, who for this pleasure signed a draconian contract demanding a six-month semen aqueduct.

A few days after I submitted the online application, Gary from Fertility Cryobank called. Secret matrices and algorithms had deemed my genetic composition worthy. The only thing that bothered Gary was the missing information about the appearances and professional lives of my grandparents. So I filled in on the fly. “Grandma’s hair? Gray. Yes, no. Probably. No. Heart failure, 72. Yep. Uh ... she was some kind of secretary, I believe. That was before women had a choice. What? No, poor health – she’s dead. Sixty ... 62? Cancer, can’t remember what kind, I was so young. Her husband used to beat her. Just remember her sipping lemonade and moaning in a recliner.”

On the seventh floor of a non-descript corporate cluster in Westwood, I met the doctor for my initial screening. I sat on an elementary school chair facing him, the walls of the office plastered with photos of satisfied customers and their engineered children. He handed me a thick contract, warm from the copier, which demanded six vials of semen a week for months. My vacation plans would be scrutinized, and I was responsible for thousands of dollars in processing fees if I defaulted on their conditions. I scrawled my name on the line.

With a pained expression, the doctor leaned back in his office chair. His hands gripped the armrests. “We ask that you donate three times a week,” he said, “And we ask that you refrain from uh, ahhm – ahem – refrain from ejaculating for at least 48 hours before collecting.”

“Oh,” I said, “is that just to, you know, build up enough pressure and everything?”

“Uh, yeah, exactly,” he said, scratching his nose. “We ask for two vials per collection, which can be difficult if you’ve recently ejaculated.”

“So three times a week,” I said, “no ejaculation two days beforehand each time. That makes six days?”

He winced and smiled weakly. “Sunday’s your big day to – ahhh – you know, to go out and have some fun.”

“Well,” I said, “that won’t be an issue for me.”

“Have you ever engaged in anal intercourse?” he asked robotically.

An obvious test! Perhaps, I calculated, they were building a new society of homosexual families based on the theory of genetic predisposition. Or did they exclude them with good-natured irony, to preserve the normalcy of their genetic material?

“No,” I said in a businesslike manner, and with a quick motion I scratched my nose. That particular combination of nervous body language and direct speech was sure to keep him guessing, I figured.

“Great,” he said, marking a paper. “Another thing. Would you be open to contact by any potential offspring?”

“Wait, what?”

“Sometimes, you know, once they come of age, they like to meet their biological parents,” he said.

Another test! I pictured a very awkward family supper, me in my 40s: “All you were to me, son,” I would say, “was $25 and a handjob.”

“I’m just going to have to say no to that one,” I said, squirming.

“Right, that’s understandable,” he said, squaring the stack of papers on which I’d signed the contract promising vials and vials of bodily fluids. “So that’s about it. Wait in that room and the doctor will be in in a minute for your check-up.”

A few minutes later an older man in a smock bustled in, snapping a rubber glove onto his hand and wiggling his fingers as he introduced himself.

“Have you ever engaged in anal intercourse?” he asked. “Don’t say yes to that one!”

“No,” I said.

“Okeydokey,” he said, “lemme get a quick look at your penis.”

“All right,” I mumbled, and dropped my pants. He went to one knee, fondled me briefly, and pronounced it satisfactory.

This way, please,” the first doctor said, and we walked to the psychological testing room, which resembled a sensory-deprivation chamber. There was only a computer, and the computer only had one program. I sat down, and the program began to ask me questions.

I was to answer the questions on a scale of one to five. The options were: strongly agree, agree, don’t know, disagree, strongly disagree.

“I get along with my parents.”

“I am happy most of the time.”

“If I could steal something and get away with it, I would do it.”

“I sometimes engage in unusual sexual practices.”

“People are out to get me.”

And on and on, for an hour. I sat there, sweating; lying when I thought it would make me seem less crazy. At the time I was in a real rut, and if I had been honest it would have looked bad. Nobody wants dysphoric progeny,

after all.

For $130 to $150 thousand, a couple can purchase a child from Growing Generations. Even HIV patients can reproduce for the right price. Who needs gay marriage? By the time you read this, we may have gay human cloning.

Implicit in the contract, I assume, is that the child will not be retarded or deformed. There are undoubtedly myriad legal gray areas regarding the warranty, but it is clearly less risky than just setting out with only a dick and a pair of balls, looking for a fertile womb.

So will the Chinese or some other totalitarian monolith, some nightmare collectivist society, one day utilize this technology to nefarious ends? In conjunction with Google’s Artificial Intelligence machine, will computer banks control the world from deep Himalayan bunkers, with Growing Generations and Fertility Cryobank as the private-sector arbiters of human reproduction? As we all know from reading dystopian novels, homosexuality will be actively encouraged in the chronically overpopulated future. American women already rent Indian wombs. Perhaps soon they will be forced to buy semen on the open market.

Will we witness the engineering of a master race, with donors and surrogates screened for flawless bloodlines? Stalin, in his infinite wisdom, once tried to create a “humanzee” by subjecting female chimpanzees to the romance of a certain Dr. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. He wanted a strong, relatively stupid warrior who wouldn’t mind freezing conditions and rotting rations. That was the 1920s in drunken Russia. It’s impossible to say what is or isn’t possible now.

The future is upon us.

A week or so later I got a message in my inbox. It was Giovanni, who had once drawn my blood.

He recited, “This is Giovanni from Fertility Cryobank. We are sorry to report that we will not be able to accept you as a donor. Your semen did not survive the freezing process. This is entirely normal,” and then breaking off into a moment of candor, “it doesn’t mean that you’re infertile or anything. It happens to a lot of guys. Thank you for your time.”