By 2002, on the occasion of the release of his self-published novel, Love Letters from Waterville, Guest had pretty much given up looking for his biological parents. He had tried for a while, when he first got the Internet, but then his life got in the way. And there was some part of him that wanted to be found rather than be the one doing the finding: "You have to be looked for, too It's a pretty big sense of rejection to fish and get nothing," he said then. "It's like, 'Why'd you even bother having me in the first place?' I wish somehow I could have been born a little bit later so I could have more access, but as it is I've got my projects, I've got a great wife, and my adoptive parents are good folks, so I'm not freaking out too bad. It's just hard not knowing the faces and getting that genetic, biological bond. At least to know something, but to have it be a complete abyss is pretty difficult."
Greenspan was skeptical that his firm could solve Guest's puzzle. He said that a lot of adopted children try to find relatives with his company, but that Guest's quest would be just a shot in the dark. Nevertheless, Guest took several of the company's tests -- he started with the 12-marker Y-chromosome test and then took the far more detailed 37-marker test and also the mitochondrial DNA test.
Jackpot. He found his biological father, his birth surname and some of his ethnic origins. Immediately after finding out the location of his dad, he registered with TxCARE, a group that uses its Web site (www.txcare.org) to reunite parents and their long-lost children. "I just went on there and put in my info," he says. "Thirty minutes later, I had three e-mails from these ladies called Search Angels, who I guess are just good-hearted ladies out there searching, and they've got access to some shit and I'm not sure that it's all legal. 'Cause they came piling back with all kinds of stuff, like my birth certificate number, which kind of freaked me out."
His mother had been waiting there for him to find her. "And it turns out that my mom had put my information on the Texas birth registry, too," he says. "I think she let herself be known, should I want to know her. So as soon as I put my stuff on there, it was a match."
The Search Angels told Guest his mother's name (which Guest doesn't want the Press to divulge yet) and that she was alive and well in Michigan. She married a few years after she gave birth to Guest and has three girls, including a set of twins. "That's good to know, because now my wife and I might not have kids," Guest quips. "And that's exactly what we're thinking of, so it's very good to know."
The Search Angels also gave him her e-mail address, and so the mother and son had their first conversation via a series of e-mails. "I wasn't ready for a phone call or a plane trip yet," says Guest, just a couple of days after he met his mother electronically. The two had only exchanged thumbnail bios. "It's weird," he says. "It's almost like a love affair that never got to happen, and now it gets to happen, but not in a gross way. But it is kind of like that. Sometime this summer I'm gonna fly up there and spend the weekend -- I don't want to go up there now. It's, you know, Michigan."
Here is what Guest has learned about his birth: "She was 17 or something like that and about to go to college, and that was when she met my dad. And they screwed up and got pregnant. There weren't a whole lot of abortions going on up there in the Midwest at that time. So her family sent her away to have the kid so she could do it in private. So she came down here and stayed at a hostel of some kind and had some doctor who her family knew."
His mother's whole life unraveled during that time. "I guess my dad didn't want anything to do with this," Guest continues. "So he took off, and she has mentioned that it is a long story and an interesting one, but I don't have it yet." And it is one that doesn't reflect well on his father. Based on what his birth mother has told him, Guest says, he does not want to meet him yet, and when he does meet him, he imagines that it will be more of a confrontation than a reunion.