You're Not Doing It Right

by Michael Ian Black

  Amsterdam breakfasts are better than the ones at home, which are always too heavy for my taste. Here in Holland we eat cold cuts and hard-boiled eggs and a slice of bread with butter and (my favorite part) chocolate sprinkles. The food tastes great this morning.

  “We should eat more chocolate sprinkles for breakfast when we get home,” I tell Martha.

  She sips her coffee and says nothing. I interpret this as agreement and resolve to buy sprinkles first thing when we return. I will say this for being high: it makes chocolate sprinkles taste amazing.

  I am better by the middle of the day, but I do not feel like doing much. Martha takes a walk and I masturbate to topless pictures of our hostess.

  The night before we leave, we polish our wedding bands so they look as shiny as possible. On line at the airport we try to look lovey-dovey, but I tell her maybe we should tone it down because customs might think we’re high and search our bags. When we reach the counter, we make sure to flash our rings and casually mention to the ticket agent that we’re newlyweds. She does not seem to care.

  “We’re just getting back from our honeymoon,” I say.

  The ticket agent looks up from her computer and warmly says, “Congratulations,” then taps at her keyboard. I shoot Martha a hopeful look. The agent gives us a big smile as she hands us our tickets.

  No upgrade. Shit.

  The airplane seats in coach are even tinier than I expected, probably a result of the roomy splendor we reveled in on the trip over. Perhaps the first-class trip wasn’t worth it because it is going to make our trip home so much worse by comparison. I give Martha the window seat and take the middle one for myself because I am a saint. A large teenage girl sits next to me. Soon we are surrounded by large teenage girls. They are seriously the largest teenage girls I have ever seen.

  It turns out the girls are a Russian basketball team and they are loud. Within an hour they are also drunk. I know it’s a cliché to say that Russians drink a lot of vodka, but sometimes clichés are the God’s honest truth. These girls drink from wheels up to wheels down and do not stop their annoying, guttural Slavic chatter even for a second. The Russians have a word to describe situations like this. So do the Americans. That word is horrible.

  More to herself than to me, Martha says, “I don’t think I can do this.” I don’t think I can do it either. But we do it.

  Arriving back in New York, we are just another haggard married couple dragging our baggage home. Yes, there are wedding presents waiting for us back at our apartment, which will be fun to open and return, but now we’ve got to figure out what it means to be married. Hopefully, it doesn’t mean making a baby anytime soon.

  CHAPTER 8

  terrified because it’s terrifying

  Martha wants a baby. We’ve been married for a couple of years and now she wants a kid. We have discussed having children before and each agree that we want them, but we have some disagreements about quantity and timing. She is thinking three. I am thinking one. She is thinking now. I am thinking not now.

  “When?” she asks.

  “Not now,” I answer. There is no other answer. There is now and there is not now. The appropriate time to have children is not now.

  “But it’s a perfect time. I’m not working,” she says.

  It’s true. She is not working. But the reason she is not working is that she is not looking for work. If she actually looked for a job, she might find one, which would make it an imperfect time to have a baby.

  “I don’t want to be an old mom,” she says. “Let’s just get it over with.”

  The statement “let’s just get it over with” does not give me a lot of confidence in Martha’s preparedness for motherhood. Then again, she has a point. If we start having kids now, we’ll still be relatively young when they move out of the house. Is that a reason to start having children? Should I begin the most important undertaking of my life by rationalizing that the sooner I start, the sooner I will be done?

  I guess so.

  Here’s the thing: Neither Martha nor I love kids. We’re not like some people we know who pine for children. The stuff that I pine for usually either tastes delicious or requires AAA batteries. Yes, I want kids, but I want them in an abstract way, the way I want, say, a jukebox. Once in a while I think to myself how fun it would be to have a jukebox. It sure would be neat to have a jukebox, I might think to myself. But I am not actually going to buy one. Because they are big and expensive and because that would be stupid.

  There are no such obstacles preventing me from having a kid. Kids are small and can live in one of our rooms. The cost of manufacture is minimal. Making babies is free. Or almost free—you do have to get the lady drunk first. Maybe there should be a fee for making babies; there would probably be a lot fewer of them running around if there were. (Actually, that’s a pretty good idea: charge people for sex, although now that I think about it, I realize that idea has already been tried—quite successfully.)

  After many discussions about the matter, and faced with a depleting store of excuses as to why this is not a good time, I agree to start making babies. And so begins the first truly purposeful fucking of my life.

  Trying to make a baby is like getting a job as a roller-coaster inspector. When you first get the job, you’re like, “Oh boy, I get to ride roller coasters every day for my job!” But by the end of the third or fourth day, it’s not nearly as much fun riding roller coasters, and after a month or two you are probably pretty sick of roller coasters altogether. And so it is with making a baby. The two most dreaded words I hear every month are “I’m ovulating.” Soon the act of copulating becomes as ritualized and dull as milking a cow. I am the cow.

  Moo.

  After a few weeks, Martha brings home a small plastic bag from the pharmacy. Inside is a cardboard box containing detailed instructions about how she is supposed to pee on the enclosed stick. She follows the instructions and we wait for the magic stick to divine our future. Negative.

  Three months elapse. Four months. Five.

  As the six-month mark approaches, the inevitable questions start to arise in each of our minds. Is something wrong with one of us? We tell each other it is early yet, not to worry, no problem. But I do not fully believe my reassurances to her, and I do not think she believes hers to me. Each of us thinks something might be wrong, and each of us blames the other. Because that’s the kind of people we are.

  Outwardly, I am willing to at least entertain the notion that our inability to get pregnant is my fault, but the actual fact of the matter is that I know it is not. I know this with a high degree of certainty. But I cannot tell her how I know this because the reason is too embarrassing.

  This is how I know:

  When I was a sophomore in college, I applied to be a sperm donor. Like many decisions I have made in my life this one was not well thought-out. I saw an ad in the college newspaper looking for sperm donors, calculated how much money I could get by doing something I did already for free, and decided to apply.

  I briefly considered the ethical ramifications of donating sperm. How would I feel about the potential of creating new people I would never know or even know about? How would I feel about my genetic material getting mixed up with random eggs in random places? Might I spend the rest of my life eyeing every gorgeous young person who came across my path and wonder, Did I make that?

  Was that kind of lifelong uncertainty worth fifty dollars a pop? Yes. If it meant I didn’t have to get a job delivering pizzas, yes. (I later got a job delivering pizzas. Jerking off is a better job.)

  The clinic is a low-slung, impersonal building nestled into an anonymous strip of dingy stores. Hardware store, deli, sperm donation center. The closer I get, the more apprehensive I begin to feel. Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe somebody I know will see me go in. Worse, maybe somebody I know will be in the waiting room. Or what if I find myself waiting for my turn outside the room used to conduct your business, and the person who comes out is my roommate, Richard? Tha
t would really be awkward. Especially if he is still holding his sample.

  I consider turning around and going back to my dorm. Except that I really could use the money. Even if I just donate twice a month, that would be an extra hundred dollars in my pocket, a lot of money for me in those days. It is admittedly not very much money on a per-sperm basis, but still.

  To forestall my decision, I decide to go to the deli next door for a sandwich, and then assess how I feel. I cross the street and make for the deli. Just as I am about to enter, however, I detour into the clinic. (I am extremely gullible when I lie to myself.)

  Inside, the clinic is small and unassuming. It looks like the waiting room for a mediocre accountant. I am the only one there. I approach the receptionist and mumble to her that I would like to apply to become a donor. She is a bit older than me and faceless. Or maybe she has a face but I cannot see it because I cannot look her in the eye. She shoves a clipboard at me and tells me to fill out the attached paperwork, informing me as I do that they only accept a small number of applicants because they are seeking people with “unusually high sperm count and motility.” I’m not sure what motility is, so I look it up later. It means how much they wiggle. Wigglier sperm are better.

  After I’m finished with the paperwork, a nurse leads me to a tiny, antiseptic, fluorescent-lit room. This is the Masturbation Chamber. Until I visit an actual sadomasochistic dungeon a couple of years later, it is the oddest place for sexual activity I have ever encountered. It looks like the kind of room where you might get fitted for orthopedic shoes, except that there is also a leather recliner and a cheap coffee table fanned with a vast assortment of pornographic magazines should I require “assistance.” I do not know where to put my eyes as the receptionist hands me a plastic Dixie cup in which to “deposit my specimen.” I take the cup. She instructs me to leave my specimen behind a little metal door built into the wall. Then she leaves and I am left to contemplate whether I can complete my assigned task.

  No. No, there’s no way. First of all, there’s no way any part of my body is going to touch that recliner. Nor am I going to page through any of those well-thumbed magazines, not unless they are first laminated and then sprayed down with industrial bleach. Also, I just do not think I am physically capable of getting it up in this environment. I should go back out there and return my empty cup to the receptionist because this is not going to be possible.

  I’m done in about ninety seconds. In fact, I do it so fast that I’m actually kind of embarrassed, so I wait around in the room for an additional couple of minutes until it seems like a less freakishly short amount of time has elapsed. Once I decide enough time has passed for a man to complete his ejaculatory business, I leave my no-longer-empty Dixie cup in its appointed place and flee the building, mortified. In a weird way, my emotional reaction to masturbating into a cup is not so different from my emotional reaction to much of my youthful lovemaking with actual girls: both experiences end with a fair amount of shame and regret.

  A few weeks later, I receive a call in my dorm room telling me the lab results are back: my sperm are unspectacular. Normal, yes, but unimpressive both in terms of quantity and dance skills. Therefore, I am not an acceptable candidate for donation. I am both relieved and insulted. My sperm are not good enough to be turkey-basted into the wombs of random ladies? How dare they!

  Since that time I have not been exposed to any serious amounts of radiation, so years later, when I approach the act of marital copulation, I am secure in the knowledge that my swimmers may not be distinguished but they are functional. They are, now that I think about it, a lot like me.

  Martha does not know about this incident in my past (until now) and so when we are slow to conceive I go along with the charade that, if there is a problem, it might reside with me. Even so, I keep reassuring her that we’re probably fine. All the books (and she has begun amassing many books on the subject) say it’s not unusual for conception to take a year or so. We’ve barely been at it six months, so we’re only halfway up the “legitimate cause for alarm” growth chart.

  Every month that goes by with a wasted pee stick finds a small part of me secretly relieved. Maybe even a mediumsize part. If we can’t have a baby, I won’t have to be a father. Which might be okay with me, because I don’t think I will be very good at it. My own dad wasn’t, and I have no reason to think I’ll be any better. I’m not even sure what a father is supposed to do other than complain about having to shave. Other things I know dads do: drink coffee, worry about the price of things, and tell their kids to go pick rocks out of the lawn.

  Is there some sort of paternal instinct that kicks in when a baby is born? Or is it supposed to already be here? Because if it’s already supposed to be here, I’m screwed. What if my sperm turn out to be fine but my dad gene lacks motility? Is there a stick I can pee on to determine what kind of father I will be?

  My biggest fear is that I will be a bad father. Maybe I will be the sort of father who only knows how to express himself with rage. Perhaps I will be the sort of abusive father who makes his kid turn to drugs. How many books have been written about terrible fathers? I do not want to be the sort of father that inspires art.

  So when Martha does not become pregnant right away I feel relief. Maybe we are not destined for parenthood. Perhaps we will end up one of those sad childless couples who spend all their time sleeping late, buying luxury goods, traveling the world, and enjoying each other’s company. That would be terrible.

  Or what if she wants to adopt? That would be a good thing to do, I guess, but where would we get the kid? The Eastern Bloc countries are out: all their babies come with weird abnormalities like flipper hands. China is too trendy. We could maybe get an American baby, but chances are it would end up being a black baby and that just seems like we’re trying too hard, like, “Look at us and our black baby.” Maybe Guatemala?

  On the sixth month, I am in the bedroom waiting for Martha to come out of the bathroom with her negative pregnancy stick. But when the door to the bathroom opens, she is, instead, with child.

  “I’m pregnant,” she says.

  She holds the test up for me to see—two little lines etched in blue.

  Oh wow. Wow. I go to her. We hug and kiss. I put my hand on her stomach.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Are you happy?” she asks.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  I’m not sure I believe either of us. Am I happy? I am. At least a certain, small percentage of my prefrontal cortex is pinging something I recognize as happiness. How much? Twenty-three percent. Another 19 percent feels relief at having accomplished the task of impregnating my wife. The rest, the other 58 percent of my emotional state, can be described as terrified—because it is terrifying.

  We confirm her pregnancy with another home test, followed by a trip to Martha’s gynecologist. They all say the same thing. Baby.

  “Congratulations,” the doctor says, the first person to congratulate us. We thank her and smile and think our private thoughts. Baby.

  All thoughts now end in the word baby. Everything we say or do, every action, every mile we drive, the food we eat, the books we read, the shows we watch. All colors. All smells. Baby.

  We agree to keep the news secret for the first few weeks. No use alerting our friends and relatives until we discern whether the pregnancy is “viable,” a term I have always found a touch unsettling because it makes it sound as if we’ve done something scientifically unproven, like crossbred a human with a walrus.

  Although Martha has sworn me to secrecy, she immediately tells everybody she knows. Our friends Kerri and Lora, her friends Romy and Kaela, her hairstylist, bus drivers, homeless people. Sometimes she just calls random people from the phone book to tell them. When I finally start informing my friends a month or so later that Martha is pregnant, pretty much everybody I tell says, “I know.”

  I’m careful never to use the expression “we’re pregnant,” because I hate it. We ar
e not pregnant. Martha is. No matter how many times I pee on a stick, I remain decidedly not pregnant. When I hear couples say “we’re pregnant,” it always makes me think they are starring in a terrible Hollywood comedy in which, because of some zany scientific mishap, both partners in a relationship end up carrying a baby. In the trailer they’re having an adorable argument standing in their impossibly well-decorated home and we hear a drip, drip, drip sound. The guy and the girl (played by Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon respectively) look down and each say at the same time, “I think your water just broke.”

  Pregnancy does not agree with Martha. She feels sick right away. The worst of it is nausea, which begins every morning and stays with her in varying degrees throughout the day. Her sense of smell intensifies, and everything she smells just makes her feel sicker. Her appetite slackens. She loses weight. She’s depressed. On top of that, we’ve recently bought our first house, a century-old Dutch Colonial, which needs a lot of work. Also, we have a new puppy. And, on top of everything else, I am acting like a total cock.

  I wish it weren’t so, but it’s true. I am surly and terse and completely unsympathetic to her condition. You feel sick? It’s your fault for making a baby. You feel tired? Sucks for you, lady. You want the baby’s room painted? Here’s a stepladder.

  One would think a good partner would not make his pregnant wife climb up and down stepladders all day inhaling paint fumes in order to paint a baby nursery. And one would be correct to think that about a good partner. But I am not being a good partner. I am the guy saying, “Hey, the room looks fine to me. If you want it painted, paint it yourself.”