Free Mommy Man by Jerry Mahoney Page B

no mommy. Stop asking.’”
    “It won’t be like that.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because it’s us. Our surrogate and egg donor won’t be mommies, but they’re not going to be business partners, either. We’ll get to know them. We’ll let them into our lives. They’ll be as close to us as we want them to be.”
    “And we’ll stay in touch?”
    “You think a surrogate is going to spend nine months with us and then walk away?” Drew put his arm around me. “We’re awesome, remember?”

5
    Um, Sperm
    “S o whose sperm are you going to use? Yours or Drew’s?”
    I knew coming out of the closet would mean sacrificing some privacy, but I never expected that a few years later, I’d be having this conversation with my mom.
    This was an unforeseen downside of surrogacy—the spermification of my life. Once Drew and I decided to give surrogacy a shot, suddenly everyone I knew felt comfortable discussing the flagellating residents of my man junk—friends, neighbors, bosses.
    “You given a sperm sample yet?”
    “What’s your sperm count?”
    “Better hope your boys are swimmers!”
    No one dropped more S-bombs than our caseworker at Rainbow Extensions. She spoke a language that sounded much like English at first, until you realized that in her native tongue, every fifth word was the clinical name of the male reproductive cell.
    “Who’s sperm we gonna use?” she asked. “We need to collect your sperm, test your sperm, sperm your sperm, and enspermanize your spermological spermograms.” This was what SpermEnglish sounded like.
    Her name was S’mantha. S. Apostrophe. Mantha. In her picture on the Rainbow Extensions website we could see she had frizzy red hair and elongated brown-white teeth that looked like unwaxed snowboards. Her blouse appeared to have been made from the sofa cushions my parents had growing up, and if I told her that, she’d probably be flattered. “How nice! I recycle everything!”
    On our very first phone call with her, S’mantha informed us that she’d already booked a visit for us to the Westside Fertility Center. “Nothing to worry about,” she assured us. “They just need a bit o’ sperm!”
    It was then I discovered a topic even more awkward than sperm itself: what you have to do to produce the sperm. Sure, I knew the procedure pretty well, but it was never something I’d done in a doctor’s office.
    Into a plastic cup.
    While a nurse waited outside for me to finish.
    As if all that pressure wasn’t enough, I’d have to make do without the standard accoutrements to which I’d become so accustomed—tender mood lighting, a can of diet A&W root beer, and a faded VHS of Dances with Wolves , cued up to the skinny-dipping river bath scene.
    Or would I?
    “You might want to bring your own materials,” S’mantha informed me.
    “Materials?”
    “You know? Materials. To assist in collecting your sperm.” Surprisingly, the word “porn” didn’t seem to exist in SpermEnglish.
    S’mantha explained that Westside Fertility catered to a mostly straight clientele, so she couldn’t guarantee the availability of the particular genre of “materials” that would help Drew and me produce our sperm.
    As much as I resented that our fertility clinic couldn’t accommodate us with the appropriate smut, I was kind of pleased to have a good excuse to buy porn. How often does that happen? All of my porn shopping memories were so bleak and demoralizing.
    For one thing, buying a dirty magazine was the most blatant way of announcing my sexuality, before I was ready to do that. When I purchased my first stroke mag, it wasn’t just an awkward step toward becoming a skuzzy grown man. It was a giant leap out of the closet. You could argue that the first person I ever truly came out to was the cashier at Newspaper Nirvana on 75th and Broadway.
    I was a senior at Columbia University, about two miles uptown, and I was doing what I always did at newsstands, reading Billboard . It was