Benediction Read online

  * * *

  I went for a Strip stroll and conveniently found myself just off Las Vegas Boulevard at the pathetic bar in the Old Nevada motel-casino. I asked for and got a Brandy Alexander. It was a girl’s drink, the catalyst Jack Lemmon used to turn Lee Remick into a raging slut-drunk in Days of Wine and Roses. Dessert, pure and simple; chocolate with an insidious little kick.

  The Old Nevada was a little bit more way out west than anything on the Strip, and the paunchy bartender averted eye contact with me after I ordered this drink, took my money and threw the change on the chipped wood.

  It was unspoken between us that I was a fag out of bounds and he’d serve me because it was his job, but that was the only fucking reason. It had better be one quick drink and one quick drink only, and then I’d have to leave and find out where the other fags were and order more girl drinks there.

  I didn’t have more. Maybe the one was enough, or maybe I was still testing that AA rule about “one drink’s too many and a thousand aren’t enough,” but instead I walked the long dark blocks off-Strip back up to the Treasure Island, walking in such a way that my cock rubbed against the fabric of my suit’s wool trousers. My perverted goal was to masturbate this way while walking down the street.

  I got as far as a pretty good hard-on, but then it wouldn’t rub just the way it had to. I knew I’d be the only fool walking on Koval Lane back up to the Mirage—Treasure Island complex, so there’d be plenty of privacy in plain sight.

  It was cold. A January wind sailed out of the northern end of Las Vegas Valley, blowing desiccated palm fronds, cigarette butts and other garbage past me.

  In this no-man’s land there was an oddly placed bus bench right at the corner of Winnick and Koval. Maria Ramirez had purchased an ad for her real estate company, Sun Valley Homesales, on the back part of this bench. Although some of the colors on her face had been bleached by the sun, she smiled out at me confidently.

  I sat there with my back covering Maria’s washed-out face and shoved my hand down my pants. I’d been given a cheap goodie bag full of worthless crap at one of the as-yet-unfinished booths of a competitor company, Farallon Solutions, and I held that in front of myself with my free hand.

  The traffic pattern was easy to figure out. There’d be a flurry of taxis and other cars, racing up the road from the airport, anxious to deliver gamblers, conventioneers and other impatient cargo to the Strip. That was followed by several minutes of eerie quiet, which emphasized our location in the middle of a lethal desert.

  Images clicked by in the slide viewer. Jake in his garden, Eric in my bed, “Ray” in the park, now Travis the waiter.

  “Suck my cock, asshole,” I imagined he’d say to me in the white tiled hallway leading to the steamy Kokomo kitchen, after he’d taken a look at the tip I’d left him on the dinner check.

  I knelt there in front of him and did as he commanded, my head bobbing up and down, as troops of male Latin employees walked by and whistled, slowly turned, then formed a line behind Travis.

  It took a lot of control not to jerk my body across the bench in pleasure as my shorts filled with the reassuring liquid. I dropped the goodie bag and heard something break inside it—cologne or another superfragrant object. I took my dripping fingers and traced my lips with the jizz, then wiped the rest off on an old newspaper by my feet. A bottle of the new smarty drink Energiz had been thoughtfully included in the bag loot so I could rinse out the remnants of cum, of chocolate and brandy, and maybe get some fresh breath in the deal.

  * * *

  The next morning I had a final little chat with Jason regarding the temporary assignment of my department into his young, unwrinkled hands. He exuded a tangible air of excitement, a sense of the new adventure that awaited him, perhaps a lust for opportunity. My head held one conversation with him and an alternate one with myself, which told me I wouldn’t have my job when I returned from Cancerworld. Jason would be in charge, and I’d be lucky to get some freelance assignments to tide me over during a fruitless search for a comparable position.

  He’d explain to me that I just didn’t have that youthful technological edge that was so important in the booming Bay Area software universe. Plus, the senior-level rates I demanded were just too much for the meager Safe Harbor marketing budget. Something would have to give.

  He’d ask: Have you thought about nonprofit work?

  “Ben?” Jason nudged my forearm, which rested on a concessions shelf puddled with ketchup. “Watch it, Ben. You’ll get your shirt dirty.”

  * * *

  I waited in TI’s cab line as a has-been, a weird guy who walked deserted Las Vegas streets at night and masturbated on bus benches while colleagues closed deals, shook hands, laughed and drank and fucked in expensive hotel suites charged to their shareholders.

  Dr. Kim and his knife waited.

  11

  At Safe Harbor, Friday afternoons were reserved for things like firing people, and if there wasn’t any of that to do, we’d chat, try to line up a date or sex for the weekend and plot how and when to leave early. I sincerely hoped that in surgeryland, Fridays weren’t regarded so cavalierly.

  Karen lobbied to drive me to the hospital, and I’d said yes. There was back-and-forth with Jake about it, and I wished he’d pressed his case a little harder. Finally, it came down to who was working and who was off that day.

  I’d be gone only for the weekend. Soren from Dr. Kim’s staff said my discharge would be Monday afternoon, assuming “all goes well. You know HMOs—not a minute longer than you absolutely have to be here, and then we kick your nicely toned ass out onto Geary Boulevard,” he said.

  I had visions of rolling down the hill from Presidio in an out-of-control wheelchair, robe flapping in the sea breeze, my bloody penis covered with one hand while the other frantically tried to steer.

  I’d done the mousetraps up with fresh peanut butter and even some good cheese, as if it were an extended vermin Christmas. There’d been another dead creature in the traps when I’d returned from Vegas, but this really had to be it. Now four months into this unfair infestation of rat children or whatever, I was sick of the drama, and any distracting novelty had most definitely worn off.

  I didn’t tell Karen that I’d had a torrid ten-minute affair the previous night. He was handsome, square jawed. He was lean and ripped. He was a top! I neglected to tell him the love we shared was my last load, the last one I’d ever share with another man, the last one I’d ever see come out of my penis.

  I gave him that liquid, that last specific part of me that I could ever give anyone—then I hung up on him. DsrtScker was in all probability a closeted, married—to a woman—and chubby sixty-five-year-old from Boise, but for a few minutes he was the archetypical man of every wet dream I’d ever had.

  I also didn’t inform Karen that I’d been making deposits at a sperm bank for the past month. On the plane ride back from New York, while I stood waiting for the lavatory, I’d checked out an in-flight magazine ad for Berkeley FertilOptions, Inc.

  Possibly better than the empty-ice-cube-trays-in-my-freezer idea, so I took the Mercedes over the bridge for a casual visit. FertilOptions was located in a yellow and gray converted Victorian on Shattuck just a couple of blocks west of the Cal campus. The facade exuded a playful springtime air that fairly shouted babies.

  Janine Fromm, a matronly nurse with a distinct counterculture edge, was both managing director and chief counselor. Turned out FertilOptions was a sperm-bank chain, with donation centers and storage facilities all over the country, most of them located conveniently adjacent to major college campuses.

  Sure, it made sense—lots of horny young guys with tons of excess but usable sperm cells that might otherwise end up on shower-room floors, on towels, on stiffening sheets and in girls who would fight the little swimmers with their own mostly effective contraception methods. One could reasonably expect that if they were in college, the boys had both above-average intelligence and a need for extra beer money.


  So they made their donations, got off and got some cash, and at the same time helped countless teary-eyed infertile couples with the promise of a baby of their own.

  Men who were about to go under treatment for cancer and other afflictions made up an additional, if small, percentage of FertilOptions’ clientele.

  “Banking on a joyful future” was how Janine quietly described it.

  She put her hand on mine and rubbed it when I told her why I was there.

  “We don’t see many prostate cancer patients, but sometimes, when they’re young like you—it just breaks my heart. You’re way too young to have this.”

  But I did have it, so what was the point? Would there be a discount?

  “I don’t have a partner or anything; I just thought—maybe I should have some sperm around, just in case,” I’d said. I’d been a cute little boy; I’d seen the pictures. Maybe someday, somebody would think—

  “We collect and store it here. It’s less costly than you might imagine,” she said.

  “Is it like a regular bank account? How do I make withdrawals?”

  “We have procedures for that. Would you be designating your donations for a specific friend, or for any woman? I see you’re not married.” She pushed her long gray hair out of her face and put her glasses back on, consulting the form.

  “Correct. Well, I don’t know. Perhaps both—I suppose there’s enough to go around.”

  Janine gave me a blank stare. “Of course, you’d be able to make as many donations as you’d like.” She picked out a couple of specific brochures from the array in front of her and turned them so I could see.

  “This will give you an overview of FertilOptions, our mission statement, what we can do for you. This other booklet here has our current price list.”

  I ran the numbers in my head. When all the tests, donation fees, storage fees, screening fees, were all said and done it looked like it would be close to two grand, equivalent to about three and a half days at the Archer in New York. It could be up to another thousand for a couple of years’ storage, should it need to stay frozen that long.

  “I’d like to get started right away. The operation is in less than a month.”

  Janine probably could not believe her good fortune, a walk-in from nowhere so easily sold on FertilOptions’ business model and high boomer-inflated prices. Truth was, I didn’t have time or energy to comparison shop. She had me fill out paperwork till my eyes crossed, and then I made my sample donation, which they’d test for bad things.

  The collection room was about as sexy as a dusty potato sack. Windowless, with a drop ceiling of off-white speckled tiles, in most ways it was a dead ringer for any doctor’s small exam room. However, instead of the cold gray exam table with stirrups there was a tired, pastel peach—covered rattan couch left over from the 1980s, and instead of the usual swabs, alcohol and bandages on top of the nearby rattan table—it was a set—there were several porn magazines splayed out in a fan pattern for easy selection. Alongside the magazines were sterile donation cups with screw-on tops, which resembled salad bar dressing containers.

  I’d been given explicit instructions. “Simple,” Janine said. Then she got close and whispered, “Just masturbate into this cup and bring it out here and give it to Canada.”

  “Canada” was Canada Smith, FertilOptions’ receptionist and administrative assistant, whom I’d yet to see move from her perch. She was a heavy young woman who appeared irritated and slightly amused at the same time, not unlike Soren.

  I closed the door, locked it, laid out the tiny packet of lube I was given next to the cup with my name and FertilOptions’ number on it. I tried to forget that at least two women knew that right now, I was masturbating not ten feet away, separated only by permeable sheetrock. I could hear them talking. I could hear them laughing.

  Mercifully, there were a couple of gay porn-lite mags mixed in with all the soft pink tits and pussy. Janine had also warned me not to get carried away and to make sure to “get every bit of it in the cup—you know what I mean.”

  I did know what she meant. This was no dank San Francisco sex club with jizz stains on the walls and floor, thank you very much. This was the sober process of harvesting sperm, saving those billions of potential bits of daddy matter from otherwise certain oblivion.

  Considering how unbelievably cold the place was and how nervous I’d become—performance issues, no doubt—July 1999 Men did what it was supposed to do and I made Janine happy by getting every drop in the cup and none on the floor.

  There were no towels, paper or otherwise, so I checked for ceiling cameras, saw there were none and wiped my hands on the ass of my jeans. When I took the little cup out to Canada, the waiting room was no longer empty.

  A youngish Latin couple and a black guy in his thirties watched me walk down the hallway with a cup of my sperm.

  “Just leave that here,” Canada said, and patted the counter with her chubby palm.

  * * *

  I sat upright on a gurney in an intake room at Presidio. Another matronly nurse type, curiously from the same Central Casting short list as FertilOptions’ Janine, fussed and prodded, had me sign things and then stuck me with needles.

  Karen sat next to me looking alternately bored and apprehensive.

  This was part of Presidio’s advance engineering team, there to open up lines and dig canals for the experts later on. Pathways for painkillers and antibiotics, whatever it is they pump you full of that keeps you alive after someone slices you open with a knife: in the slide viewer Dr. Kim, as sushi chef, our Sunday night patio daddio.

  I guessed it was saline dripping into my arm. As if reading my mind, Janine-clone said, “For hydration—some saline. In a few minutes, we’ll take you over to pre-op, where they’ll put in the epidural.”

  She walked away and I turned to Karen. “Oh, good.”

  “My sister-in-law had one when she was in labor,” Karen said.

  “For the pain,” I said, slowly, trying not to sound excited. I was thrilled to be getting legitimate morphine and derivatives for a bona fide medical reason. If I had to do this, better to do it high.

  In a few minutes the nurse returned and announced it was time to move down the hall on the gurney. Karen would be left behind in the movie-of-the-week world of waiting rooms, vending machines and a few almost obsolete wooden phone booths.

  She grabbed my arm. “It’ll be just fine,” I said to her.

  “Of course it will. And you know what? I’m going to work out a new festival schedule for Hell for the Holidays while I wait.” Her voice cracked.

  “Karen, you don’t have to wait; what about Dennis? I know you have a husband, for Chrissakes. You don’t need to be—”

  “What you need to be is quiet,” the nurse snapped.

  “You’ll call Jake?”

  Karen nodded. The gurney pushed open a double door into a world lit in soft blue light.

  I was parked, braked and left flat on my back. Eventually a woman arrived and looked down at me. I raised myself up on my elbows.

  Her identification badge hung on a very obvious rainbow lanyard. I couldn’t read her last name, but my immediate thought was that I should divulge to her that I was gay, too, as if an in-the-trenches camaraderie would make it go better for me. The words caught in my throat. She looked at me questioningly, through very undyke-like glasses, waiting.

  “I forgot what I was going to say.”

  She smiled. “I’m going to put in an epidural. For the incision pain, mostly, though usually with prostatectomies there’s not that much from the actual cut.”

  She moved around to my back and I felt the swab, pokes with her finger, a little prickly sensation and the sound of tape being ripped. “All done,” she said. “I’ll see you in the operating room in just a few minutes.”

  * * *

  An Asian man in scrubs, mask and a floral head wrap appeared in front of me. “How are you today, Mr. Schmidt?”

  It was Dr. Kim, dressed up for
Halloween. I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t opened his mouth.

  “Oh, hi. Guess I’m OK, considering,” I said. He had kind eyes. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  “We’ll be getting started. Everyone treating you well?”

  “They’re going to give me good drugs, I think.” I wish I hadn’t said that. He pretended not to hear.

  “I’ll make sure you have the minimum discomfort, Mr. Schmidt.”

  I felt waves of rage and sadness as I lay there in my sickly green tunic, IV lines running.

  It was awful.

  “Please take good care of me,” I said.

  Goddammit. I looked up at the ceiling and it moved. Someone pushed the gurney from behind, someone with dark skin and hairy forearms.

  We were in the Cutting Room. The easiest way to stomach this was to pretend it was a movie set. Lights, costumes, makeup, lots of activity, unintelligible banter.

  There was a thin tube up my nose now.

  “Oxygen; it’s just oxygen.” The lesbian anesthesiologist’s masked face was close to mine. I turned to look at her.

  I heard myself say, “What?” She had a halo around her head and repeated, very slowly, “Ox—y—gen,” which reverberated inside my head as if it were hollow.

  Oh, and my Wayne was there.

  Curious, as he wasn’t in the medical profession at all. More curious still, since he was long dead. I wasn’t surprised to see that he was still the stalwart iconoclast, refusing to wear the surgical garb and instead insisting on a flannel shirt tied around the waist of his blue jeans, black T-shirt complemented by black Doc Martens, pure vintage Seattle 1991.

  He came to my side in slow motion, grasped my left hand with both of his and rubbed my fingers. Then he leaned over, smiled and kissed me, putting his wet, very-much-alive tongue in my mouth. If I could’ve moved my arms I would’ve slipped my fingers through his soft, curly red hair.

  “Good I got here before they put your lights out, Benny,” he whispered. Could the anesthesiologist hear him? She was sitting right behind my head!