I didn't realize how hard it would be to sell myself. I've sold myself for most of my adult life, not for profit, of course, and this was the hardest sell after a lifetime of decent, near-big sales, chances missed or blown or just cement-hard luck. Making our life together, which is pretty great, look great not to us, but to a knocked up stranger in Flagstaff, was going to be harder to achieve than I imagined.
I'll make a Mac Book I decided over my second trenti of iced black tea. Then we met our lawyer- our lawyer, which are the exact words you catch yourself saying - 'we have to go meet our lawyer' as you wave a diamond ringed hand and you can't help but roll your eyes at yourself... then wonder all the way to the lawyer just who the fuck are you again and was everyone else rolling their interior eyes at you as well? Can you blame them? Isn't that why they are your friends, because you all would roll your eyes at women like you are right now. So we go to our lawyer, everyone in Los Angeles who can't conceive and want an American-made recycled child goes to him, and he tells me that everything I not only think but already know (because that's how I roll) is wrong.
First, that we have no clear advantage over gay male couples, who, this being LA, are our biggest competitors for American-made recycled children. Two well off gay men will be our biggest competitors- and yes, we are following the second season of "Modern Family"(thanks everyone for telling us about the GUYBB episode- we caught it) - like strategists planning a battle, over who gets to have a Serena & Lily-inspired nursery. Andrew is baffled by this fact because we present well. We have good couple curb appeal. He's at least so handsome and kind eyed he makes me look more well raised than I really was. But you'd really have to stare in my eyes to know just how much I'm deep-pile carpeting. Not that Andrew isn't just as complicated, he's just better raised.
Other than that, we're both white, blue-eyed and have hair. Who wouldn't pick us to dumpster dive their baby and make a "This Is Our Baby" Book. On a Mac. Very hipster meets West Elm meets Etsy. We look like we already are parents, of college kids who are taller than us; that's how parental we look.
But, gay men do better with these clearly not too evangelically oriented birth mothers because she will live her life knowing that even though two men will parent her child, she is the only mother that baby will ever have. See, even me, a virtual man of a woman, is too much like a mother for the birth mother's comfort level. I get this. It's mother DNA- it's what makes mothers lift taxis off their trapped babies- it's a fierce little instinct.
But where I do draw the line is that our Give Us Your Baby Book (GUYBB) has to be tasteless, uncreative and on construction paper. Our Jewish lawyer who does magic tricks to soothe his essential tremors tells us our GUYBB shouldn't appeal to your gay best friends from Berkeley but to a girl in Tennessee who if she ever heard the story of my life, would pray for my devil-soaked soul then burn a cross on my lawn if I ever moved to her town.
Our GUYBB will have to be really DIY and not in an meta- Etsy way- it has to have like unicorn stickers in it. Our GUYBB must have photos of ourselves smiling and doing certain actions. No art photos, no looking just off camera, no black and white, no cleavage, nothing that leaves room for interpretation, nothing raunchy or knowing or clever or creative. In other words, not one photo that we have. Either of us. And we do have cameras. We just might as well have been raised in a Scientology Fort for all the unusable pictures we have.
We have not one boring, smiling at the lens, in front of a Christmas tree or over a Steaming Turkey Carcass photo, with beaming, normal, un-shiftless or stoned looking extras- family and friends. We've been together 4 years, we have families we talk to, we do interesting things and go places but there exists not one single camping shot where we weren't trying to replicate something ironic or represent something creative. So we have a meeting with our lawyer...
And he rejects all our pored over, carefully chosen photos. We failed GUYBB. So I shut down but not before hating Andrew with everything I have. It's all his fault. He and his brothers look nothing alike and they aren't a clingy bunch, so a recent Christmas photo of the three brothers together modeling gift scarves resembled more of a still of three strangers waiting for a bus.
My family is much worse. I was a bald baby with merely the promise of red hair and I sobbed before every photo was taken so my eyes were swollen and my eczema was raging in every photo. My mother's eyes were always closed in every single photo to the degree that I have made a Mac book full of my mother's life, depicted with her eyes completely closed. I'm only upset because I only looked good in the photos where my mother looks like Andrea Bocelli.
Or I've picked a picture where three distant planets are eclipsing and I have the chimera of a hint of cleavage. Or one where at least one member of family looks like they may pass out. Or punch the camera. And not one photo have we picked of us smiling, hugging and both just looking at the goddamn camera. We stare at each other in the lawyer's office. We are complete strangers to each other. I don't know him anymore but I know I hate him.
Our lawyer tells us we need to stage ourselves as a happy, healthy loving normal couple with adoring family members, camping photos that don't resemble Burning Man rejects and decorative, but not too creative, holidays. If we are to host and throw down, it's gotta look L.L. Bean, not even Garnet Hill. If we look even a little too J. Crew or Anthropologie we might as well try to keep making babies the way most people do, by accident. And we will never be parents. And I wonder, do I really want to be a parent if I haven't even managed to look like I've had a good life? Who am I? Not a parent. Clearly.
Then our lawyer calls. They have a birth mother. Please call her. She's due February 1st. Aquarius. That'd be nice. Mixed race baby. Our favorite kind. But she'll need a baby book.
So I go back to the box of photos to find something we can photoshop a Christmas tree or each other into, and perhaps erase some of Andrew's earrings and his pony tail or his conjoined twin he had made and screwed into his head from that Halloween costume. Maybe we can photoshop Andrew into a canoeing picture over the third Todd? Cut and paste each other into old prom pictures, so we look like we've been together longer.
I sit before the box of my family's life that still smells like the beach house a full year after I shipped it from West Gilgo. And the more I look at the hundreds of photos the more I realize that Photoshop just might not be advanced enough to make my life palatable to a young woman who's wondering if she should return my phone call and see if my voice sounds like one she might be able to give her newborn to.
And the more I look I amuse myself by imagining the book I wish I could make- here's Kathleen as a rashy ten year old boy, depressed in catholic all girls school, with her first gay boyfriend, posing behind a sheaf of wheat for art school, snarling into the lens, (art school) smoking and drinking with the band that was going to be the next Flock of Seagulls, with her blind mother, and another prom, and another prom and another prom, is that the second or third Todd? Here she is with platinum blond boy hair, too much make up, black fingernails or just giving the finger, or in a play, or just drunk, with a 6 foot penis at her bachelorette party. What kind of birth mother would a book of my honest, entertaining lifetime of mistakes attract? Would I want her baby? The idea of me trying to prettify my tragi-comic life for a woman who's probably made a few wrong turns herself stops me in my tracks. Now I don't know what kind of GUYBB to make. Can't I just give them a Ikea catalog and say, it's like that, only with more wrinkles.
Would the birth mother respect me more for telling the truth? Couldn't I just tell her we host Thanksgiving and cook for 20 people and have done it now for four years to sold out crowds? We just didn't bother photographing it because we were actually busy doing it.
But we need to not just live our lives- we have to art direct and stage, and fluff our lives, like baking cookies in a condo we are desperate to sell before an open house- we need to create the illusion or scent of home sweet home. I'm scouting pumpkins and front porches right now.
We both are now falsely documenting - moc-umenting our lives- running into family photos that no one has motioned me into- here I am grinning like an insane person with my in-laws over the cobbler I made, not for their 80th birthdays but for my god-damned GUYBB so that Andrew can photograph me with them and it. 'Make sure you get the cobbler in it!' I bark at Andrew. My in-laws are scared.
Ten people are coming over next Saturday to forge Halloween and Thanksgiving-easy to cram them in one day. Gonna get Andrew some Dockers. We will look respectable. Dull. Safe. Inviting. Easy to outdazzle. I haven't wished I was a gay man this bad since I learned my boyfriend was gay.
