The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  CHAPTER 12

  A FATHER, FOR BETTER OR WORSE

  I was waiting for Tom to call me back so I could tell him about his father, Jeremy Sampson. I felt grim. Tom had begun his search expecting to find a Nobel dad, a genius, maybe even Jonas Salk. Instead, he was getting Jeremy—an obscure doctor whose notable accomplishment in life was leaving a wake of ex-wives and forgotten children. There’s nothing worse than a wish unfulfilled, except a wish fulfilled.

  So I wanted to try to make it gentle for Tom. When he returned my message, I told him the big news. I said that Samantha and I had found his father, his name was Jeremy Sampson, and he was a doctor in Florida. I didn’t mention all Jeremy’s kids, his erratic past, his made-up IQ, or his exaggerated accomplishments. Tom, who was never speechless, was speechless. After a little bit, he managed to mutter, “Wow, great” and “Thank you” and “I can’t believe this.” I told him to expect a call from Jeremy the next day. Before I hung up, I suggested, very shyly, that perhaps Jeremy wasn’t exactly the ideal father and that perhaps Tom shouldn’t expect Jeremy to surpass all his hopes and dreams. Tom was too shell-shocked from the headline—Dad Is Found—to listen to my caution. I hoped for the best.

  Tom felt more excited than he had for years, but he warned himself to calm down. He knew he was an easy mark. He was too ready to believe the best in others, and he had been burned repeatedly because of it. Only when he had met Lana, who was full of Slavic pessimism, had he realized that he lacked common sense and critical judgment. Now he was aware of his naiveté, and he tried to order himself to be careful and not to hope for too much. But he couldn’t help it. His parents’ divorce had just been finalized. Maybe discovering Jeremy now was more than a coincidence. Just as he was losing his old father, here came a new one to take his place. Perhaps Jeremy would be the dad his dad had never been.

  Back in Florida, Jeremy was happy enough to learn about Tom—another notch in his Darwinian bedpost—but was genuinely thrilled to hear that Tom had a son of his own. “I am amazingly happy elated shocked and surprised that I am a grandfather!” he told me. I gave Tom’s phone number to Jeremy and told him when he should call.

  The day arrived. Tom took off from work. He spent the afternoon pacing around the house, playing video games, and staring at the phone. Sometimes it rang, but it was always a friend or someone calling for his mom. At 8:30 P.M., it rang again, and Tom knew this was the call. That’s my dad calling. My dad, he thought. He answered it on the first ring.

  “Hello, this is Jeremy. I’m calling for Tom.”

  Tom had rehearsed this moment over and over for the past two years. In the conversation he had imagined, he would be angry. The rage would spill out of him. He would confront Donor Coral, grill him on why he had thought it was okay to jack off and leave.

  But instead his mind went empty. All he could think to say was “Hello.” And then “So you’re my dad.”

  Jeremy said, “Yes.”

  The conversation scraped along with chitchat. Jeremy tried hard. He asked for Tom’s address. He asked about Darian. He asked about the weather in Kansas City. For Tom, it all felt out of body: I am talking to my dad, and I have nothing to say. Tom thought Jeremy sounded old. Still, Jeremy’s curiosity comforted Tom, because he had feared that Jeremy would be chilly and distant. Jeremy called Tom “Tom.” But Tom didn’t know what to call Jeremy. He still couldn’t decide. Finally, after a few minutes, Tom tried saying “Jeremy.” It felt okay. Secretly, just a little bit, Tom still thought of him as “my dad.” Tom invited Jeremy to visit him in Kansas City, and Jeremy reciprocated by inviting Tom to visit him in Florida.

  The conversation flagged after ten minutes. Jeremy’s eight-year-old daughter, Stacy, pestered her dad to hand her the phone. She didn’t know who Tom was, but they talked for a little bit about nothing. Then, at Tom’s end, Darian hit his head on the floor and started screaming. Tom had to comfort him, so he said good-bye to Jeremy and that was that.

  I called Tom the next day to find out how the conversation had gone. He told me, “It was great,” and said he was really happy. Then he confessed how stilted the conversation had been. He said he already feared Jeremy was going to disappoint him, that they were not going to have a real relationship.

  A few days later, Tom got a call from Jeremy’s sister. She said she wanted to welcome Tom to the family. She filled Tom in on the Sampsons’ history. She told him he might be a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Ben Franklin. He might also be a descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of one of the Salem witches. The sister also boasted about how brilliant Jeremy was. She insisted he was a genius, though Tom was dubious. Jeremy had sounded too much like a regular guy on the phone. Then she delivered a warning. She told Tom about Jeremy’s many, many children and his spotty treatment of them. Tom was stunned by the news but he was determined not to judge Jeremy till he knew him better.

  During the next couple of months, Tom and Jeremy squeezed in only two short phone conversations, both abbreviated when Darian started to cry. Both calls frustrated Tom. He and Jeremy weren’t getting closer. Tom yearned for a visit. He wanted to show off Lana and Darian to his donor dad. It soon became clear that Jeremy wasn’t coming to Kansas City, so Tom arranged a visit to Florida. Tom, Lana, Darian, and I would fly to Miami in early September and stay with Jeremy for a couple of days. We would also meet Jeremy’s latest female companion—possibly a wife, he called her indeterminately his “old lady”—and their two daughters.

  Tom, Darian, Lana, and I rendezvoused at the Miami airport at midnight on a Friday. It was Darian’s first plane ride and Tom’s first trip to the East Coast. As they waited outside the terminal for me to pick them up, Tom and Lana stuck out in the colorful Miami crowd. They were wearing their regular uniform: black Insane Clown Posse T-shirts with glaring satanic clowns on the front. Darian was in his baby seat, cheerier and more active than when I had seen him six months earlier. He had a shock of blond hair and a permanent wide-mouthed grin, like a happy hippo.

  Tom’s voice was softer and mumblier than usual. He sounded nervous. “I have that night-before-Christmas feeling,” he said as we drove to the motel. “I’m scared and happy and excited.”

  Tom was worried about juggling his two dads. He feared he was trading Alvin, a dad who was imperfect but familiar, for the unknown Jeremy. “I told my dad—my first dad—I was coming out here. My dad really wasn’t too happy about it. He didn’t say much. But he told me he didn’t want me to go.”

  At the motel, Tom told me he was frightened that what was inside Jeremy—the compulsion that had made him sire X children and not take care of them—was also inside him. “The dad who raised me was not a good dad. I was really hoping Jeremy would be a good dad. I am already scared I am going to be a bad dad to Darian.”

  Alvin had taught Tom nothing about being a good father. If Jeremy was also a bad father, that meant that Tom’s genes were stacked against him, too. So nurture and nature were conspiring against him, directing him toward paternal incompetence, indifference. I tried to reassure Tom that his two dads didn’t matter. He was already proving himself a good dad, I said. After all, I pointed out, at the very moment he was expressing this fear, Tom was hunched over a motel bed, dabbing the spit-up off Darian’s yellow onesie. His family would be fine, I told him, if Tom trusted himself and not his DNA.

  Discovering you are a genius sperm bank kid can muddle you in all sorts of ways, but the worst may be in causing you to suddenly believe in genes. Before Tom discovered he was a Nobel sperm bank baby, he had never thought about whether his DNA had made him the way he was. There had been no reason to. But once he learned that he had a special genetic heritage, he applied genetic thinking to his whole life. If he did something well or badly, he would credit it to the genes. When he thought about his future, he tried to read his DNA like a palmist reads hands: What does the double helix say I should do? And now that he had found Jeremy and learned his dubious history, Tom was letting the genetic perspec
tive rule him again. He was discounting the evidence of his very own life—the fact that he was working his eighteen-year-old butt off to raise, nurture, and financially support his baby son—because his genes seemed to contradict it.

  Tom was doubting more than just his parenting skills. He seemed uncertain about everything, as I saw the next morning, when I invited him and Lana to accompany me while I visited a friend who worked at a Miami radio station. Tom was mesmerized by the station’s engineering booth. He left the studio talking a mile a minute about how he should be an audio engineer. A few minutes later, when we stopped at Subway for breakfast, he reconsidered. He said he didn’t know where he could get trained.

  This segued into a tentative, hesitating monologue about his career plans. “For the past four months I’ve been racking my brains about what I want to do. Sometimes I think I want to be a lawyer or a veterinarian. Or maybe I want to be a doctor, but maybe I can’t. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I want to write novels, but that is really hard to get into. Or I could just stay at my mom’s company, I guess.” I asked what he really loved to do. “I really like to play video games—that’s what I really love. But there are no jobs, except being a game tester, and that’s even harder than getting a job writing novels.”

  After breakfast, we started driving out toward the distant suburb where Jeremy lived. It was a clear day but viciously hot. Tom called Jeremy from the road to let him know we were on the way. When he hung up, Tom was back in good spirits. “Jeremy kept asking me about Darian, checking to make sure we have the AC on in the car. He also wanted to know if we are all going to stay with him—he says we’ll have to squeeze, but that it will be fine. It’s weird, I haven’t even met him, but it seems like he really cares about us. Whereas my dad who I have known for eighteen years doesn’t care about anyone.”

  Then, out of the blue, Tom announced that he and Lana were married. They had sneaked off to a justice of the peace two weeks before. There had been no witnesses and no party. They had told no one before they went and no one after. Tom’s mom had figured it out a few days later, when she had noticed the marriage license poking out of the diaper bag. She was pleased, because she had feared that Lana could kidnap Darian back to Russia if they weren’t married. Mary had been trying all kinds of different arguments on Tom to get him to tie the knot. The one that had worked was money: Tom’s car insurance would drop by $115 a month if he got married. That’s why they had done it, Tom said. (“Yes, not for love,” Lana injected dryly.) Tom did not say why they had married so suddenly, right before this trip, but he didn’t have to. Tom was eager to present Lana to Jeremy as his bride. Tom mentioned that he and Lana had even considered flying to Miami a few days early and getting married with Jeremy there.

  As we drove, Tom sank into a Jeremy-focused reverie, his mood shifting in almost every sentence. “I have a feeling I may end up without a good relationship with either Jeremy or my own dad. It won’t be a real father-son relationship with Jeremy, that’s what I am worried about. I can talk to my mom about anything. She knows how my life is going, and I know how her life is going. She tells me that she loves me, and she tells me that she cares. That’s the kind of relationship I would want with my dad—with Jeremy, I mean. But that’s not what he signed up for, is it? My dad was supposed to do that. But he didn’t. But maybe Jeremy can end up being a caring father, or at least another friend. It doesn’t sound like he is with his own kids, but who knows?”

  We reached Jeremy’s suburb after forty-five minutes. It was one of those vaguely familiar places whose name conjures alarming images from the back end of the national newscast—where periodically there is an especially senseless and spectacular murder. It was a sprawling, indefinite suburb. One strip of malls melded into the next. The town itself seemed to consist of fast-food outlets, motels, and a decent university. We followed Jeremy’s directions to a quiet street of grim little ranch houses. We parked in front of the grimmest and littlest of all. That was Jeremy’s. It was white, now smudged to gray. A chain-link fence surrounded the yard. A ruined car lay in the driveway. We got out of the car. It was at least ninety-five degrees, and the asphalt shimmered. It occured to me that this was not a place Jonas Salk would ever have lived. Jonas Salk would have been afraid to even drive through here.

  Jeremy had warned me to knock on the left-hand door of the house and to be on guard for the pit bull that his neighbors kept in the right-hand side of the house. We walked up the driveway in silence. We could hear the pit bull barking insanely inside the house. Tom held Darian so that he was shielding him from the house: if the dog raced out, it would have to go through Tom to get to the baby. The house was a wreck. Windows were boarded up with plywood; gutters drooped; siding was dangling off. I saw no left-hand door. Tom knocked hesitantly on the one door we did see, which was scraped and scarred. The dog’s barking became more crazed. After fifteen seconds, there was the sound of dead bolts turning and chains being lifted, and the door opened on the scariest person I had ever seen. He was a white guy, maybe thirty years old. He was shirtless and heavily muscled. His head was shaved, and his mouth was open in a half smile, half grimace. This revealed that his top teeth were gold—all of them. Tattoos stretched across his chest and abdomen, covered his arms, shoulders, and neck. I know nothing about prison, but they looked like prison tats.

  “Excuse me,” Tom said. “We’re looking for Jeremy?”

  The guy stared blankly at us. “Jeremy?” he said. Even that one word was hard to understand, thanks to his impenetrable drawl and gold teeth. Three other guys, also all shirtless, muscled, tattooed, and frightening as hell, emerged from the gloom behind him and glared at us. Their eyes were freaky: they were amped up on something—crystal meth was my guess, given our location and their paranoia. The dog, if this was possible, was now barking even louder. It felt like a nightmare, Deliverance meets Cujo. The four of them looked us up and down. Tom and I had exactly the same thought: they were drug dealers, and they were trying to decide if we were cops. Thank God Tom was holding Darian, I thought. No cop carries a baby on the job.

  Tom again asked for Jeremy. Finally one of them said, “Jeremy. You mean Jeremy Sampson?” Tom nodded, looking relieved. The guys relaxed a little, too. “He’s around the other side of the house.” The house looked too small to have an “other” side, but indeed it did. When we walked around to the left-hand side, past a broken umbrella and various crippled toys, we saw there was indeed a side entrance.

  Tom knocked on the side door. It opened, and Jeremy stepped out to greet us. He said, “You must be Tom.” Jeremy reached out, and the father and son embraced awkwardly, all shoulders and arms. So this was what happened when father and son met: nothing much.

  Jeremy was in his late forties, but he looked fifteen years younger. He was wearing dress pants, dress shoes, and a garish blue Hawaiian shirt, untucked and open almost to the navel. Tom and Lana had the same first impression: he was a dead ringer for the “hero” in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one of Tom’s favorite video games. (The aim of Vice City was to do anything to anyone for the hell of it—kill strippers, run over old ladies with your car, whatever got you off. Tom tried to block this image from of his mind: it was too alarming, maybe because it was too apt. What had Jeremy done with his life, if not whatever the hell he wanted?)

  When I saw Jeremy, I finally understood why he had persuaded so many women to have his children. He had a shambling, raffish Dennis Quaid thing going. His hair was thick and dark, lustrous with some kind of product; he was always running his fingers through it, calling attention to its beauty. He had boyish, laughing features. His eyes were particularly striking: they were slit-narrow, but deep blue and twinkly.

  Jeremy hugged Lana after he released Tom. Then he wiggled his fingers in front of Darian, who was delighted. He shook my hand and thanked me for coming. His voice was muddy like Tom’s, but it also had an almost foreign lilt to it. He ended most sentences with a singsong “you know?” It made him sound a bit l
ike a Mexican gangster.

  He ushered us into the house and said, “Please, make yourself at home.”

  I didn’t see how this was possible. For starters, the house was a sweatbox: it was ninety-five degrees outside and at least ten degrees hotter inside. There was no air-conditioning. A ceiling fan wheezed slowly, stirring the air hardly at all. We entered into what seemed at first glance to be a living room but was actually a bedroom, living room, dining room, and study all rolled into one. It took a while to figure this out, because the room was so gloomy: all the bulbs in all the lights were out, save a single, naked sixty-watt bulb on the ceiling fan. A blue carpet covered the floor. The shag was matted and covered with crumbs. Crushed Pokémon boxes, crumpled family photographs, dirty clothes, old copies of National Geographic, and books about American Indians littered the room. Crayon was scrawled on the walls. A boom box in the corner blasted Cambodian pop music.

  Jeremy gestured for all of us to sit down. Lana perched precariously on a canvas director’s chair that was missing an arm. I took a wobbly wood chair. Tom sat down gingerly on the trundle bed, which was covered in stained Star Wars sheets. Lana and Tom looked stunned. Lana was confused: she had always thought that doctors were rich. Tom was thinking, This is my supersperm donor dad? I live ten times better than this. I wondered how Jeremy expected us to spend the night here. The apartment already slept Jeremy, his old lady, and their two girls. Where would we fit?

  As soon as we all sat, Jeremy popped out of his chair and stepped into the kitchen: “Would you like some melon?” he asked.