N - Fifty Bucks in His Pocket

My parents have never met each other.

My life was made possible by an act of masturbation. Sometimes I try to picture my father sitting in the clinic, alone in one of those rooms with a single bench attached to the wall and a stack of porno magazines in front of him on the floor, hosing me into the sterile cup in his opposite hand. It's a surreal thought, to think of the man who chose to share his flesh and blood with me doing so in such a cold setting. Was he just a kid saving up to buy his first hot rod, walking out the door whistling with fifty bucks in his pocket and a smile on his face? Or was he a hopeless and desperate virgin in his 30's who needed the confidence boost of knowing that numerous women would be carrying his children within a year's time of his deposit?

The possibilities are so endless it makes my blood spin. I am Marshall James Spencer, and I have no idea who I am. The abandoned infant, the tolerant son¦those things I am, but what is my name?

My mother was honest with me about how I was conceived once I asked her about it, and I try not to hold it against her that she wasn't straight with me from the beginning. In 1972, she married a man named James Spencer, a mechanic and weightlifter who liked to pick her up and swing her around a lot. He passed away prior to my birth, and he is the man I believed to be my father until I was twelve years old. It wasn't until then that I realized his dark, large build had nothing whatsoever to do with my blonde, middleweight stature. Our names and a neurotic but loving woman I call "mother were all that we shared. And even though I've always loved this man through the many pictures I've seen and stories I've heard, I can't help but feel the gnawing of a thousand curious teeth at the inside of my skin about the stranger walking down the street who is half of me.

I find myself thinking more and more about him these days, much more than I did when I was a teenager. Why I feel such a burning need to know more about him now at the age of twenty-seven, even though I've known the circumstances of my conception since I was twelve, I couldn't say for sure. I've always wondered, but I've never felt a need to know more until now. The hands of time spare no mind its beatings, and more often than not, the passing of time is what drives me.

Heritage. Ancestry. Do I have an uncle with this same crook on the tip of his nose? Who has the blonde hair that I have? And for God's sake, where did I get this abnormally long second toe?

My children might be curious about their grandparents as well, and I'd like to be able to give them an answer. My children. I can't imagine giving them away. They do not yet exist, they are phantoms without a womb, but they belong to no one else. It's amazing really...for a man with limited heritage, I sure do take a lot of pride in it.