I read A Million Little Pieces. I watched Oprah transform James Frey from literary celebrity to a sack of whimpering contradictions on national television. So, I want to get this straight up front…

There’s a wide gradient line out there dividing memoir and fiction. It starts with the pure brightness of truth and fades into the opaque darkness of complete invention. The Genius Chronicles is a memoir that lives on the bright side of the line. It’s not based on a true story, it is a true story. But… it’s also a memoir.  Memoir implies memory – and memory is nothing but a wide gradient line dividing truth and invention. To the extent that my memory allows, I’ll be sticking with the truth on that line, too. Where I suspect – or intend – to move into the realm of imagination or invention, I’ll let you know before I head that direction.

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]]> http://www.billbanning.com/genius/2010/01/note/feed/ 0 http://www.billbanning.com/genius/2010/01/about-the-genius-chronicles/ http://www.billbanning.com/genius/2010/01/about-the-genius-chronicles/#comments Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:29:36 +0000 wb http://www.billbanning.com/genius/?p=43 In 2001, David Plotz wrote an online series for Slate Magazine exploring the “Genius Babies and How They Grew” and in 2005 a book titled The Genius Factory, in which he tells the story of the Repository for Germinal Choice, also known as the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.

In late 1987, my daughter Sarah was conceived through artificial insemination by donor (AID) with sperm from the Repository. She is a Genius Baby.

The Genius Chronicles is the working title of a memoir I need to write. I’ve needed to write it since the day the doctors told me I was infertile. Now, I’m going to start. It’s a story worth telling. It’s absolutely true. It’s a work in progress that started coming together in blog posts in the Genius Chronicles blog category. But there’s something odd about reading a narrative from the bottom up. So I’ve started creating static content pages (comments welcomed) with each of the chapters as they get revised to the point that I’m willing to share them.

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Susan and I had been trying to get pregnant for well over a year. Nothing from her OB-GYN indicated any trouble on her part. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when the report came back from the urologist… along with a request to provide another sample. He just wanted to be sure of the diagnosis. It was highly unusual to find absolutely no sperm present in a semen sample from an otherwise healthy man in his early thirties. But that’s just what I’d given him the first time. This was not a case of extremely low sperm count… nope. There wasn’t a swimmer to be found. So he wanted me to repeat the test – provide another sample. Oh… and this time, I was supposed to send all of it – not just a small sample. Huh?… that wasn’t a small sample, that was the whole wad. Crap.

Somehow, I knew that repeating the test would be an empty formality. There wouldn’t be a greater volume of semen to send. There wouldn’t be a just low count, or poor motility. Nope, there was nothing of reproductive value in the first sample and the second sample wouldn’t any different. I was shooting blanks. I already knew. I’d suspected it for a long time.

Puberty had come right on schedule. All my plumbing seemed to be doing what it was supposed to do… with an adolescent vengeance. I’d had the talk. My father brought me a copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask, which was a hot bestseller at the time. I’d been allowed the nervous freedom to borrow adult magazines from my dad’s substantial collection. My body was changing, just like every other boy about my age. My bedroom door remained closed most of the time I was there alone. Mom and Dad explained how they understood my need for privacy and gave me their word that they would always knock before opening my closed door.  They kept their word – even waited for me to open the door from my side on the infrequent occasions they interrupted my pubescent preoccupation. I had privacy, I had Playboy, and I had the the powerful urge to take advantage of both on a regular (normal for my age, I imagine) basis. The only thing was… something wasn’t right.

Don’t ask me how I knew it, or even exactly what it was I knew. I had yet to see the drippingly explicit pornographic images that would have shown me immediately I wasn’t producing anything like the quantity or consistency of a normal ejaculation. I wasn’t yet sharing my intimate moments with anyone real. Just me, Mr. Palmer and a box of Kleenex. But, somehow, I knew something wasn’t right. At one point I remember receiving a microscope as a gift that was supposed to encourage my intellectual curiosity and open the door to a career in science. I figured it’d be a great start to look at a sample of my own sperm. Except, there was nothing to look at. At first, I blamed the microsope for what I wasn’t seeing – it was nothing more than a cheap toy, after all. Then I blamed myself… I must not know how to use it. Nothing to worry about. And I didn’t really want to be a scientist anyway.

So, years later when the doctor asked me to repeat the test, I did as he asked. I repeated the test because, even though I suspected – even though I knew – that the second time would be the same, I desperately wanted it to be different. And let’s be honest – I repeated the test because the act of creating a sample was never a problem. No matter what was or wasn’t swimming in the substance I produced through do-it-yourself stimulation, the act of producing it was never a chore – even when the output was destined for a plastic cup and a urology lab. I repeated the test and I waited.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Just a few weeks earlier – before the first test – Susan, answered the phone in our tiny rented condo late on a Sunday evening. “It’s your mother,” she said and handed the phone to me. “She doesn’t sound like she’s feeling very well.”

“It’s your father,” my mother said. “He’s not doing very well. He’s had another heart attack and he’s on the way to the hospital. I’m leaving to be with him. The doctor just called told me I should let the family know they need to come soon.”

I was calm as I told Susan that we needed to go. I was calm as we drove for over an hour from our home in Escondido to the hospital in San Clemente where they had taken my father. I was calm as I wondered aloud if he’d survive this one. The first one had almost killed him more than ten years earlier. The second one and the third one were minor by comparison. By now he’d convinced himself that all of them were flukes and… really, that the last two weren’t even heart attacks. He was fine. Never better. He’d been swimming regularly. He’d been losing weight and gaining strength and he was feeling really good. He and my mother were days away from departure for a six-week trip to Europe.

We rode the last half hour in silence. When we arrived, the night-shift nurse greeted us at the door to the  emergency room. It was a small hospital with not much action on Sunday nights, or any night for that matter. We were it, and they were looking for us. As Susan and I walked into the long sterile hallway, my mother appeared from a room to the left. She looked old, tired… alone.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The results of the second test were the same. There still wasn’t much semen (maybe less than the first time), and there still was no sperm. There was something seriously messed up in my reproductive system. I was completely infertile. Incapable of creating life. The only hope I had now was to figure out the root of the problem and hope it was correctable. A diagnosis of infertility didn’t have to be the end of the road, did it?. Whatever was causing this problem was going to turn out to be something treatable anyway; nothing more than an inconvenience on the road to procreation, not a dead end.  It was something that I could overcome with the right attitude, the right work ethic, the right timing, the right position or the right medical treatment. I was going to be a father one way or another.

But it didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet ready to accept any other denouement… I already knew. I had suspected it for a long time. I had just lost my father. I had just lost my fatherhood.

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It is just a few minutes past midnight… a few minutes since the young woman in my hotel room turned twenty-one years old. Now she wants to buy her first legal drink before we call it a night. It’s been way more than a few minutes since I turned twenty-one years old.  Thirty-three years more than a few minutes if you need to know.

Now, I’m about to escort this nymph-like beauty upstairs to a club on the top floor of this classic, but no-longer trendy, hotel on Union Square. She is tall – the kind of tall that pushes right up to the limit of too much leg and not enough torso. Her form is reminiscent of Venus de Milo, fully armed. She is wearing an unusual combination of retro 50’s chic and contemporary Goth – like a twisted combination of Donna Reed and Elphaba from Wicked – without the the green skin. She is the embodiment of a of love I once believed I could never have in my life.

She pulls her driver’s license out of her wallet, drops it in my shirt pocket and tells me it’s time to go.

My relationship with her is curious… and complex. Despite the difference in our ages, we have much in common. We are bound by a matching set of emotional and cerebral contradictions. She is intelligent, witty, sarcastic and dark. She is naïve and ill-prepared for adult life. She is mature and wise beyond her years. She is a child. She is creative and talented, and often her interests become obsessions. She is shy and fears rejection in social settings, but oozes confidence and assurance in her creative pursuits. She suffers from a curse of potential and an awareness of just how much she is capable of accomplishing. She is not deeply religious or spiritual but she personifies the passage – often incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela – from the metaphyical writer and Unity Church minister, Marianne Williamson that begins:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

She is a lot like me.

Upstairs at the club the surly bartender is completely disinterested in her excitement about reaching the minimum drinking age only moments earlier. For her first legal drink she asks for something straight – no mixed girlie drink will do tonight. She has had whiskey before, but tonight it will be an expensive scotch. Neat. The bartender pours a small taste from each of three bottles that he has selected for their variety and aging. She picks the peaty 18-year old single malt with a surprising air of self-confidence. It is a nice selection, but I can’t tell if her choice is based on a preference for its taste or a symbol of her attitude.

As she takes her first sip there is a fleeting moment when her animated facial expressions freeze, almost imperceptibly. It is an instant that reveals her truth. She doesn’t really like what she’s drinking, but she is determined to finish without revealing her true distaste. It takes over an hour to get to the bottom of the glass and she keeps a stoic face with every sip.  Between sips – through the din of the house music – we talk. We talk about things that matter and things that don’t. The time drifts by slowly and it passes in a blink. The uncertain future hangs over us like the musk in the air that fills the club. There is an unexpected connection between us that has only grown stronger with time. Tonight, I can almost touch it.

Just before closing time her glass is empty and she is ready to leave. I move to pay the bartender – but she doesn’t want her first drink to be a gift from anyone. An awkward moment passes as she realizes she has no way of paying. Everything but the driver’s license proving her age is on the bed a few floors down. I slip her enough cash for both of us. She pays for herself, keeps the change and leaves me to cover my own tab… and the tip for both of us.

That was last night – early this morning, actually. Now it’s approaching 10:30 a.m. and she is still asleep. She is still barely twenty-one years old. I am still thirty-three years older than she is, and I still love her more than anyone who knows our story might think possible. I sit across the room from her, intermittently staring and reading the copy of Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead that I picked up last night at the City Lights bookstore. The book promises to be “an irreverent yet practical guide that combines solid writing advice with guerrilla marketing and promotion techniques…” I imagine that it will be an irreverent, but practical motivation for me to get off my metaphorical ass and write this story before I become senile and forget what actually happened.

I have known her since the day she was born – during a time when I was in love with her mother. Now, twenty-one years later, we are closer than ever. Our relationship has evolved to the point that our bond feels more than emotional or ethereal – that somehow a connection is in our blood. But it is not. Our bond is made of something other than DNA. On a genetic level we are completely distinct.

Her name is Sarah. She is my daughter.

She is the direct descendant of her mother – who we’ll call Susan – and a vial of frozen semen collected from some still anonymous genius – who we’ll call Light Green. When it comes to her conception – her very creation – I like to say I had nothing to do with it – but that is a bit of an oversimplification. I held the flashlight.

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