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CHAPTER 1
THE LATEX TISSUE
The good news was that, one way or another, this virility test was going to end in an orgasm. If I've learned anything in this life, it's that any outing guaranteed to end in an orgasm couldn't be a bad thing. I thought about what the place might look like. Positioned in the poshest part of town, a tall new building with gushing fountains centered underneath bright white letters with polished stainless steel trim, reading "LifeCorp." Walking through the automatic glass doors, I'd be hit with the scent of a candle cleverly mimicking the scent of freshly baked cinnamon buns.
Making my way through the magical sperm repository, I see a sexy blond administrator at the end of the lobby looking eager to take my name. She reaches under her desk, pulling out a stack of porn and shifting it invitingly towards me as I complete my paperwork. "Nice choice," she acknowledges as I made my selection. "This one is rarely picked, though it's definitely one of my personal favorites." Sometime later, after the shy glances from her no longer excite me, an equally attractive brunette nurse pokes her head around the corner. Grinning at me, like she just finished a long conversation about the hot guy in the lobby, "Ah ... so you must be James."
She leads me back through the winding halls to a cubicle made from loosely placed bamboo dividers. It resembles a massage parlor, accented with a small table displaying a pot of fresh green tea and a neatly folded thick white cotton robe. She offers me a choice of five different lubricants, highlighting the finer qualities of each. I make my choice while she awkwardly hangs around just long enough to make me think she might stay. When she finally walks to the other side of the bamboo divider, I notice a thimblesized see-through plastic cup on a small table. Smiling, I think how impressed they'll all be when I fill it to capacity.
I know what you're thinking, that's exactly how you imagined it. Well, it wasn't anything like that, not even close. You may ask, was there only a single porno magazine ... Was it a Playboy? Even worse, a European Maxim? If only that was the case. No, the place I went was called LabTech and the experience was entirely different.
The journey began with giddy excitement. For the first time, a doctor's appointment wouldn't involve taking my blood pressure. There would be no tongue depressors. This would be like nothing I'd ever experienced, at least not in a doctor's office. I headed northwest, "Hmmm, Galleria is east, but no matter ... I'm sure it's going be in some cool district of the city I've never seen before." Driving for several miles, I went from farm road to farm road, finally approaching what MapQuest stated as my destination. Pulling in, I saw a very unassuming building: a typical, sprawling, ugly, Texas, one story fake stucco strip mall that, as an architect, offended me deeply. I must be at the back entrance, judging by the distinct lack of fountains.
Inside, I was indeed greeted by a woman, but not of the variety that I had hoped for. She was blondish, with streaks of red and brown. Her hair was held in place with so much hairspray that it resembled cotton candy. She was thick in appearance and thin in manners.
She was surrounded by dusty silk plants. Green leaves spattered with purple trim — apparently a common silk variety, yet I've never seen its organic counterpart. She handed me a clipboard shockingly light in porn and heavy in forms. Completing it, I remained cautiously optimistic that something fantastic waited behind the large swinging aluminum doors to my left.
I tried to stare through the tiny Plexiglas windows encased in the doors, hoping to see some scrub-adorned UFC ring girls, Hooters waitresses, and Tropicana swimsuit models. Instead, all I saw were white walls spotted with teal and magenta painted doors.
After what felt like an eternity, the fingerprint-laden grocery store doors flew open. A nurse emerged that could best be described as a female version of Jim Norton, the balding guy on all the Comedy Central Roasts — except this version was wearing purple scrubs and a large grimace.
The nurse led me through the open magenta door leading to her office. There wasn't much inside: a desk and a grey plastic cart filled with Sharpies and what looked like sippy cups without the sippy part. She reached down and grabbed a single, ridiculously large sippy cup.
"Place the sample in this, put the cover on it, and bring it back. No lubrication is allowed. Go next door, close and lock the door and come back here when you are finished."
It took me a minute or two to process this information. The instructions were short and direct enough, but I was trying to wrap my head around the whole "no-lube" statement. Everything she said after those words were placed in the in-box of my brain, waiting their turn in queue.
There are two basic types of men in this world: the first comprises the normal population. These people get up in the morning and run hot water over a soft fresh facecloth. They place that warm, comforting facecloth on their face to open their pores. They calmly lather up a horsehair brush with shaving cream and evenly apply the moisturizing foam with aloe to their supple warm skin. It's usually around this point that they pull out a razor. The general rule of thumb on razors is that, if the razor has fewer blades than you have fingers, you probably live on a ranch. Either way, you run said razor under scalding hot water and begin shaving. Once finished, these men splash hot water on their faces, pat them dry and complete the process with face balm and a finishing mist of after-shave.
This brings us to the second category of men: masochists. Masochists get up, grab a rusty old disposable single blade razor from the top shelf in their medicine cabinet and begin tearing stubble and the topmost layers of skin from their faces. No product is needed, only limited amounts of cold water. Their face is left bleeding and raw. These people masturbate without lube.
Defeated, I took my sippy cup and went back into the hallway looking for the room the nurse had described. There was only one nearby door; it was the teal green door next to the nurse's office. Inside a virtually empty room waited, with a belly-button-high grey fabric cubical wall cutting it in half. There was nothing more than a single stool behind that half wall, and it was upholstered with dull magenta leather. On the nearest side there were built-in grey cabinets with grey laminate counter tops highlighted with, you guessed it, green and magenta flecks.
The sexiest thing in the room was the opened box of latex gloves resting on the counter with one limp glove waving from the top like a half drawn tissue. There certainly weren't any cups of green tea or bath robes to be found. Even worse, there was no sink, or mirror, or even a hook on the door. How could you not have a sink in a masturbation room? How was I going to clean up? I immediately realized that the whole room was most likely covered in a thin film from hundreds of men's cumulative "samples." This was a road I could not travel. My brain needed shutting off if I was ever going to have any chance of getting off. Back to the sink. Without a sink, what was I supposed to run wastefully in the background to cover up the sound of ... you know? Damn it, this was going to take a while ... no this was going to take painfully long. I desperately wanted to leave, pack up my penis and go, accepting failure in what might be my first fatherly act.
Four days and three hours later, only after sheer hunger and sleeplessness drove me to find the strength to ejaculate in the humongous sippy-cup, did I emerge. So, it may not have actually taken that long, but the cup was huge. Had there been a sink in that room, I would have added water to my "sample" just to hide my shame ... ah, right, no sink — now it makes sense. Walking in to the nurse's office, I was blushing, dehydrated and ashamed. She pointed to the grey plastic cart and said, "Take a marker, write your name on the side of the cup and set it down there. You'll get the results back in a couple of weeks."
The days that followed my virility test brought me to the first pregnancy myth in a long list of untruths I would soon expose: planned pregnancy. Unless, of course, you simply meant pregnancy has a plan of its own. I would soon leave the comforting routines I had always known, pulled along in the wake of a life I no longer controlled.
What the nurse and I didn't know was that we were both wasting our time. I had a whole other test being processed at that very moment, a cheaper, more accurate virility test: an ovulating uterus, specifically my wife's ovulating uterus.
CHAPTER 2
WEEK 4: BABY CAVE
One week later, my results came back in the form of a blue line. It should have been a lesson to me. Conception was defiant, caring nothing of our plans to start trying the following month.
I remember how the morning started. My wife, Ellen, told me that she thought she felt something going on in her ovaries and suggested she might be pregnant. Not possible, I thought. I haven't gotten my virility test results back yet. In my mind, I was sterile until a doctor told me otherwise.
For years, I'd been called a hypochondriac by my closest friends. They were wrong: I didn't invent problems. Symptoms were simply evaluated, and eventually I settled on what I felt was the most probable diagnosis. In this case, the evidence came about six years ago from an urologist's diagnosis: one functioning kidney and one non-functioning kidney. Basically, this meant one kidney was functioning correctly and one kidney was a giant dead sack of pee. I was told that it was probably "just a birth defect" and was nothing I needed to worry about. This news, of course, came a few moments too late, after the urologist, like a bloodhound, had already gone straight for my testicles. The good news was completely overlooked. Instead of moving on with my life, I choose to fixate on that very moment: the moment my testicles became a thing of interest to that urologist and somehow symptomatic of a dysfunctional kidney.
Thankfully, at the time, I at least had the wherewithal to enquire, "Why the sudden testicular obsession?" He went on to explain that kidney-related birth defects affect sexual development. This was vague and not particularly helpful to me, so I pulled out my laptop that evening and began a thorough investigation on WebMD. I found some particularly interesting information.
A kidney defect at birth could lead to restricted growth? Gary Coleman, for example, had kidney disease when he was born, which explains why he never grew any taller than four foot seven. I'm six foot four, 235lbs. Finding out I was one kidney away from being the white Arnold Jackson was pretty shocking to me.
Unlike Gary, my height was unaffected, my penis appeared adequate, and my testicles were verified by my urologist as reasonably placed and to scale. So, why was I so worried about being sterile? It was because I'd dated a lot of crazy girls. Not only had I dated them, I'd been in long term relationships with them and never had a single pregnancy scare. Not so shocking for a guy with all his organs — one could simply pass it off as good luck. However, once I'd established that I was one kidney away from micro-penis, I spent the next six years convincing myself that I had been robbed of functioning testicles. I grew to accept that I had placeholders serving no other purpose than to frame out my penis.
I was wrong. I wasn't sterile at all. I was the Greek god of semen. I was Testeclese. I had successfully impregnated my wife only weeks after she had stopped taking birth control pills. I felt joy, but also pity for my wife's exhausted and defeated body. Not because of the transition she would soon undergo, but for all the years her body must have struggled to fight off my powerful libido. Every cold, sinus infection, fever and back-ache she suffered since dating me was almost certainly a result of a weakened immune system from fighting off the constant threat of pregnancy. We were lucky she was able to defend against my super-sperm's will to impregnate as long as she had.
Ellen needed a doctor. Fortunately, we were only three miles away from her OBGYN, a proximity that served me well. It won me an argument when Ellen suggested we consider using a midwife to deliver. I convinced her that the midwife practice was too far away in city traffic. This was a much better argument than how I truly felt: midwives were un-American and Ellen was two hairy armpits and a midwife away from losing her passport.
* * *
Ellen and I met at the doctor's office later that week, both having left straight from work. Normally, I would puff-out my chest in a room full of women, but not here ... there was no need. Nothing said "functional penis" like a husband accompanying his wife to a gynecologist's office. Before we knew it, Ellen's belly would puff-out enough for the both of us. We waited anxiously, imagining what we might see. Could the ultrasound already detect if we were going to have twins? I was pretty sure it couldn't detect the sex this early. The penis wouldn't be developed enough at this point, but you never know. Who knows how big my penis could have grown had it been supported by two functioning kidneys. Do Pampers even make diapers to accommodate something like that? Pampers Magnum. My thoughts were interrupted by the nurse, "Va-va-sour?"
We headed toward the room and, for once, it was exactly how I had imagined it. Maybe because my expectations were low, or more likely because I never wasted much time fantasizing about the inside of an OBGYN's office. We sat inside for a few minutes while the nurse exchanged pleasantries and asked my wife to de-robe.
This marked the end of my wife's body as I knew it. I imagine much in the same way a werewolf 's husband might feel as his furry bride revealed herself on the first full moon after their wedding day. My wife's body morphed, but not into a hairy monster, howling as she roamed around aimlessly in the darkness, not yet anyway. But her vagina, once a beautiful place of magic and wonder, was only moments away from becoming a nine-month-long science experiment.
Ellen nervously sat back on the industrial strength thigh master, spreading her legs, as she bashfully pushed the thin paper robe down between them. Within seconds, there was a knock on the door and it popped open about a third of the way.
"Hello?"
Wow that was fast. I usually sat flipping through year old copies of Country Living for nearly a half an hour when I was at the doctor. Of course, I wasn't sitting alone in a room with my half naked wife, spread-eagle, in what was essentially the world greatest sex chair. Yeah, they'd better be fast.
"So what's going on?" the young, reasonably attractive, female doctor asked as she walked into the room.
My wife went on to disclose the results of our pregnancy test and how she'd been feeling. I didn't listen, I was preoccupied. As if compelled by some twisted gynecological instinct, the doctor's left hand shot out blindly and grabbed what could only be described as a slightly elongated Nintendo Wii controller. Simultaneously, with her right hand, she reached forward into a nearby tissue box and pulled out a loose condom. She then rolled the condom onto the joy-stick single-handedly. She even pinched the tip. Reaching for a nearby white tube, about the size of a Pringles can, she continued to engage Ellen. She squirted something that looked like a distant cousin of the blue filling from an icepack over the end of the condom-covered controller. Never breaking eye contact with my wife, she gave the Wii controller the smallest little hand-job. Before Ellen had time to react, the 1982 black and white 12" televisions to our left and right began to display an indecipherable grayish blur.
"Yep, there it is. It's early, but you are pregnant."
I peered deeply at the screen for anything that looked remotely like a penis.
"See that black dot? That's the hole in the uterus where the egg's implanted itself to develop."
Oh my God, I thought. That little hole is our baby.
CHAPTER 3
WEEKS 5 TO 12: NO SIGN OF A PENIS
As the weeks passed, we began the futile but mandatory expecting parent quest for knowledge. We researched the big items like "What should Ellen avoid during pregnancy?" As it turned out, the simpler question may have been "What in the hell can Ellen do during pregnancy?" We knew the obvious stuff like alcohol, sushi, roller-derby and poison. But did you know that pineapple, eggplant, and small dogs with flea meds could also be dangerous? We soon learned that catalysts for any number of birth defects hid behind every corner.
Any and all research we began opened Pandora's Box of further research, all written by authors waiting to tell you whatever you wanted to hear for $22 and a Barnes and Noble book card. Books were clearly organized by motif, with words like "Natural", "Midwife", "Homebirth", and "Dr's Guide." For the record, none of our books had "Easy" in the title. Most of the knowledge Ellen sought led you to believe that "Easy" was for venomous unfit mothers frantically seeking any way out parenthood.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Birth Control"
by .
Copyright © 2013 JAMES VAVASOUR.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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