Be honest, fellas. How many of you have ever heard a judge say in response to your protests, "If you feed him long enough, he'll look like you"?

Oh, so I'm the only one?

No matter how long Avon Alston feeds the son under his court-ordered financial care, it's unlikely he'll start looking like him: Two DNA tests proved that Alston is not the father of the child he's paying for.

Yet, still pay he must.

Alston, a Franklin County native, has seen his paycheck garnisheed for 16 years to support a child who biologically cannot be his offspring.

The court's response, despite copious amounts of evidence, has been the same as that of Vice President Cheney when a reporter informed him that most of the American people felt the country had made a mistake in invading Iraq: "So?"

"I was all happy and joyous when I got the DNA results back," Alston told me last week. He had with him a large envelope full of paperwork legally excluding him from daddyhood.

"When I took the DNA evidence in and tried to give it to the attorney before the case started, he wouldn't even take it. He said, 'I don't want that.' He pushed it away like it was the plague or something.

"The judge told me to go get another DNA test. ... He said he wouldn't take a look at my evidence without an attorney," Alston said. So he got a lawyer who, for $1,500, told him it would be hard getting new DNA evidence introduced because the 60-day statute of limitations for challenging paternity had expired.

The lawyer was right. The judge and the district attorney still refused to look at the DNA tests. "It was like a nightmare," Alston said. "You would think the judge or the DA would have some compassion."

It's not that judges have no compassion, Wake County District Court Judge Vince Rozier said. When he was a judge handling child-support cases, he said, "I felt sympathy" for men who discovered belatedly that they were not the child's father, "but there's not much you can do. ... Once you acknowledge paternity in open court, you're on the hook."

Alston is not the single, hard-partying tractor-trailer driver he was when he met the child's mother for a short, intense affair, he said. He's still a truck driver, but he's now 44, married, with a 2-year-old daughter. Before finding out that he wasn't the father, he says, he never sought to shirk what he thought were his obligations.

"My wife and I offered to adopt him, bring him into my home, make him mine for real since I've gotten so close" to him, he said. The boy's maternal grandmother, his guardian, nixed that idea, he said.

On an episode of "Married With Children," the third greatest television show of all time (behind "Sanford and Son" and "The Andy Griffith Show"), patriarch Al Bundy did something particularly stupid that prompted his teenage son to glare and ask, "Are you sure you're my father?"

Al's reply? "Well, that's what your mother and 17 blood tests say."

Had Alston taken just one within the prescribed time, he might have avoided his current predicament.

In a future column, I'll tell you why there is a statute of limitations and about a proposed law that might make it easier for men to challenge paternity.