Life Worth Living (10 page)

Although I did not succeed in plucking Bill out of my affections, I did end up in bed with Tucker. Beautiful as Tucker was when his clothes were off and the lights were dimmed, with his blond hair and smooth, firm, rugged muscles, I still only liked him. So I transferred my attentions to Ernie Koy, another member of the team. Sadly, the electricity wasn’t there either, although it was with Marlin McIver, who played for the Dallas Cowboys, I think. He was a powerhouse of pure, unadulterated passion. The pity was, he didn’t live in New York. If he had done, he might have accomplished the trick and weaned me off Bill. The next thing I knew, another Giant, Fred Dryer, who, with his room-mate Ray Hickle, was a platonic friend of mine, was warning me to be careful. Apparently, just about every member of the Giants team was exchanging stories about their amorous adventures with me. That astonished me – even guys I hadn’t met were saying what a great ‘lay’ I was. If only they’d known the full story. ‘You don’t want Bill to hear,’ Fred said, but I wasn’t so sure; maybe it would make him jealous. ‘And maybe not,’ Fred concluded, neatly encapsulating my options.

So I took my attentions elsewhere, to the scions of Fifth and Park Avenue, none of whom would ever know Bill (or so I thought, until I turned up at a party at Dr Scholl’s heir Don Scholle’s East Seventy-Second Street penthouse and saw the object of my love leaning against the wall drinking Scotch). But despite my best efforts, I had been spoiled by those athletic paragons of masculinity. Money did not buy a beautiful body, at least not in those days, and on more than one occasion I committed the unpardonable faux pas of backing out when the guy’s clothes were off. One man even accused me of being a ball-breaking bitch, which I regarded as perfectly understandable, considering the appalling way I had behaved.

By now the Vietnam War was at its height, and every now and then colleagues of mine at FIT would invite me to join protest
marches. To be truthful, I had no inclination for any form of protest. My own life was bogged down in quite enough involuntary protest as it was. Even so, it was just one of the many effects of my upbringing which kept me apart from my peers. I also had a strong antipathy towards drugs at a time when you could not visit friends or attend parties without being offered ‘stuff’. This was partly an after-effect of the period I had spent in hospital in a drug-induced state, but another factor was the strong influence of my Lebanese heritage: the culture does not lend itself to substance use, much less abuse.

Teenagers, however, like to fit in, and I was no exception. I therefore tried pot (and so hated feeling out of command of all my faculties that I swore never to touch it again); amyl nitrate, the climax-enhancer which many a jock wanted to push up
your
nose when
he
was coming (I got such a ripping headache, I would have preferred being hit on the head by a baseball bat); cocaine (which was wasted on me, as I was already confident and outgoing by nature, and rather than talking more, I needed to talk less). I knew only too well that my mind was my salvation, and that without it, my life would not be worth living. So the idea of dabbling with psychedelic drugs like LSD filled me with horror. I could do very well without seeing colours more vividly or taking a ‘trip’ that ‘blew’ my mind. What would happen to me if I went on a ‘bad trip’, or worse, permanently blew my mind?

As I look back on that period, I can hear my father’s voice ringing in my ears, stressing the value of clear thought; of doing what was right and not what everyone else was doing (Mummy was big on that one, too); of being a credit to God, family and self; of not allowing people to lead you down futile paths. Even though I sometimes mocked him for being a ‘stiff’ and a ‘square’, I was enough my father’s daughter to have listened and learned. So I developed a reputation for being a clean-living, virtuous girl (the Giants football team excepted) who loved a good party and indulged in nothing more than a bit of heavy petting. And, unlike many relicts of the sixties, I can actually remember what I did. And with whom.

I
n February 1970, I graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology. A measure of how much that accomplishment meant to me can be gleaned from where I spent the graduation ceremony: at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel attending the Viennese Opera Ball. With my graduation, the official reason for my presence in New York ceased. I was not unduly nervous, however, for I had finally learned how to ‘play’ my father. I told him that I was staying in New York to get work experience as a designer. He wasn’t happy about me being so far away with no person or institution to ‘protect’ me, but I had made up my mind that I could not endure his ‘protection’ in Jamaica in the run-up to being twenty-one. There was just no way I was going to spend another six months shorn of my identity.

Daddy was obviously still waiting until I was old enough to sign the papers for my surgery myself, and whether he would foot the bill was still a moot point. So when he telephoned me from Florida, where he was staying for the races at Hialeah, to ask me to come back home for two weeks – ‘I want to see for myself that you’re OK’ – I resisted the temptation to ask him why he should think I wasn’t, when he had just seen me over the Christmas holidays. Instead I agreed to go home as long as he gave me his word of honour that I would be allowed to return when the fortnight was up, which he did.

Making sure I left my apartment in New York up and running, so that I had a reason to return quickly, I flew back to Jamaica a few days after Daddy and Mummy. It was now seven years since Grandpa’s murder, and during that time, Daddy had overcome his fear of change enough to actually travel quite regularly with Mummy. Whether he could go that extra mile, and commit himself to an even more profound journey, was something I feared finding out. Mummy obviously felt the same way, for no sooner had I made sounds about going back to New York than she asked me to stay. ‘He’s so worried in case things go wrong. Can’t you remain here and show him how wrong he is?’ No one needed to explain to me the intolerable emotional burden Daddy and his concern could place upon his loved ones. Reluctant as I was to stay, I did not wish Mummy to bear the brunt of it, so I agreed.

I was there for six months. Preparations for Sharman’s wedding, which were gathering momentum, helped to keep me occupied. Mummy had not acquired a reputation as a formidable organiser of social events (personal as well as charitable) for nothing. I found myself cast in the role of assistant, running here to arrange for flowers to be put into cold storage, there to proof the invitations with the printers, and elsewhere doing the myriad things that make the difference between a superb occasion and an ordinary one. In the process, I acquired invaluable experience which I was later able to use for the benefit of various charities.

On the surface, I seemed to be coping well. My mood remained cheerful, my attitude positive. I was often out, usually with my Azan cousins Ken, Abe, Richard, Charles, Lorraine, Beverley and Thelma, and Thelma’s fiancé (and first cousin), Milade. I adored them all. They were warm, kind, generous, hospitable and protective. They made it clear to me, and to everyone who asked – and those who didn’t, for that matter – that they were behind me 1,000 per cent. They included me in virtually everything they did, from hunting at night for crabs by the seashore, to going to dances, parties, the racetrack and the cinema. Yet underneath my coping mechanism was finally failing. I had had too much pressure and, without even realising what was happening, I stopped eating. My future brother-in-law, Ken, who is a doctor, spotted what was happening.

‘You’re developing something called anorexia,’ he said. ‘It’s very serious and it can kill you.’

‘But I feel fine,’ I protested.

‘Are you aware that you’ve eaten practically nothing for the last few weeks?’

‘Haven’t I?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Georgie, anorexia is life-threatening.’

‘Don’t be so dramatic, Ken. I’m fine. I promise. I just don’t understand how I could’ve stopped eating without noticing.’

‘Well, you have. And if you lose any more weight, no reputable surgeon will touch you,’ he warned me shrewdly.

And indeed, I was displaying symptoms of anorexia, but I was not a classic anorexic. I did not possess the delusions of self-image which lead thin girls to consider themselves fat; on the contrary, I had always considered myself too thin. Nevertheless, I was suffering from a stress-induced form of the condition, so Ken prescribed Peryactin, an anti-histamine which made me sleep virtually around the clock. I would fall asleep literally in the middle of a sentence, something which his brother Richard, who often sat with me to keep me company, found as funny as I did. What was no joke was eating. My throat constricted every time I tried to get any food down, and if I forced myself, I gagged. If I did not force myself, I became so ravenous that I felt like fainting – until I tried to eat.

This was a whole new nightmare, but Ken handled it sensibly. ‘Don’t worry about nutritional value. Just eat anything that will go down,’ he advised. So I lived on chocolate ice cream. When Ken married Sharman, they moved to Canada. I was now the only ‘child’ at home. My little sister Margaret was at boarding school and my brother Mickey was a barrister in England. Cousin Abe stepped into the breach to protect me against further stress. In many ways, he was an ideal protector. He was Daddy’s favourite nephew, closer to Daddy than his own son. Mickey, for instance, loved classical music while Daddy and Abe loved horses. They would chatter away happily for hours
about the form or breeding of this horse or that, whereas Mickey had never had a common interest with Daddy as a basis for easy conversation. ‘I’m sure Daddy wishes Abe had been his son instead of me,’ Mickey said on many occasions, and, while I regretted the poignancy of the situation, I was now glad of it.

Abe stood up to Daddy when he tried to get me to stop wearing discreet make-up. He danced with me when we went to parties. He took me to the races, to the movies, to the country to see his parents. Had it been anyone but Abe, there might have been trouble. As it was, Daddy only said, ‘You’d better be careful, Abe, or people will think you’re Georgie’s boyfriend.’ Daddy and I were both speechless when he replied, ‘And what of it if they do, Uncle Mike?’

Between June and August, I had my gynaecologist in New York check out who had the reputation as the finest surgeon in the United States. For once I was going to take a leaf out of Daddy’s book and opt for the best. Word came back that there was a plastic surgeon in New York whose speciality was vaginal reconstruction, and that he had extensive experience both with malformed females and with males who wished to change sex. Good, I thought, I won’t be a guinea pig.

On 17 August 1970 I turned twenty-one. Ten days later, Frances Bacal picked me up at Kennedy Airport and took me back to her New York apartment. At my initial appointment with the plastic surgeon, he explained that he could not be sure exactly what the operation would involve until he opened me up, but he expected it to be reasonably straightforward – cleaning up my clitoris, parting my labia and thereby opening up my vagina. He said there seemed to be no reason why I could not have a full sex life, with complete gratification. He even advised an interesting post - operative pastime: masturbation. He said it was his observation that patients with genital abnormalities profited psychologically as well as physically from playing with themselves once their problems had been straightened out, because so few of them had touched themselves beforehand. Having been brought up in a prudish atmosphere, I nearly fell off my chair at what I felt was a recommendation of vaguely immoral conduct, but I was careful not to let the doctor see how shocked I was. It was just as well, for then he brought up the question of my weight. ‘I’ve always been thin,’ I said, my stomach sinking somewhere down by my ankles. ‘My father is skinny and my mother slender. It’s genetic.’ That seemed to convince him, and I breathed a sigh of relief when he suggested that I checked into his favoured private hospital on the 2 September.

No one ever faced the knife more eagerly than I. You would have thought I was going on a wonderful cruise – which, in a way, I suppose I was. Finally, after twenty-one long years, I was taking the first irrevocable step – the second would be when my identity was ratified legally with a change of papers – towards acquiring a birthright everyone else had from infancy and took for granted thereafter.

I did not expect people to understand the torture I had had to endure for so long. Bitter experience had taught me that the world was divided into two kinds of people: those who
recognised suffering and had compassion for it, and those who did everything in their power to distance themselves from anything disagreeable. All I wanted was to be allowed to lead as normal a life as possible. Although it later emerged that I could not have children, the operation turned out to be even more straightforward than the surgeon had hoped.

This I found out when a sixty-four-year-old transsexual, who was operated on on the same day, came into my room and said, ‘I’m Hester. I went to the theatre after you. My surgery was an hour early. But you’re a girl!’

‘Of course I’m a girl,’ I snapped.

Hester turned out to be sweet and generous. She could not have been happier that I was having a chance to lead a life she never could. She and an actress who was in for a facelift often came to see me during the four days I was there.

The doctor was pleased with the way I was healing and confirmed that my vagina had required less work than expected. But he was concerned about my inability to eat, which he now recognised as anorexia, and refused to discharge me from the hospital except into the care of my mother. To his credit, he did not remonstrate with me for minimising the problem, but he did say that my body weight was perilously low, and that he could not accept responsibility for my welfare. So Frances Bacal took me back to her apartment, and Mummy flew in from Jamaica.

If I was in danger of fading away, I nevertheless retained a sense of humour. One evening Frances made me a cream cheese and smoked salmon bagel, which was one of the foods I usually loved. But one look at it was all it took for my face to contort with revulsion. ‘Georgie honey, you’ve gotta eat. You’ve just gotta. You’ll die if you don’t. You’re nothing but skin and bones. You look awful – just like Greta Garbo in
Camille
.’

I burst out laughing. ‘Frances,’ I said, ‘everybody should look as awful as Greta Garbo in
Camille
.’

Poor Frances had a terrible time getting me to eat.

Mummy was very sporting about leaving her own life and coming to New York to be with me, but the lion’s share of the cajoling was done by Frances. She gave up trying to appeal to my vanity when even the TV repairman tried to pick me up, much to the horror of her sister Belle.

‘You can’t ask her out,’ she said, shocked. ‘She’s a society girl.’

Yet for all the trouble I was having with food, I had never been happier or more at peace. The sense of relief I had experienced when I opened my eyes in that hospital and realised that no one could ever get me to live as a boy again was beyond profound. My mind could not help wandering back to the truly remarkable life I had just left behind. Now that I was free of it, a part of me viewed it with incredulity. Had I really lived through all that? It was a healthy affirmation that the past was past. So, too, was my unnerving habit of breaking without warning into floods of tears for minutes on end.

The first time it happened was the day after I was released from hospital. I was alone at Frances’s apartment, Mummy and Belle having gone to the diamond district. I was completely surprised. It was as if the tears were flowing from a stranger. I did not feel sad, nor was I upset. For a split second I wondered what they could mean. Then I realised that it was merely my psyche releasing all the years of pent-up emotion. For I had been steadfast in avoiding self-pity, and never cried, not even once, throughout the whole of my ordeal. I did not anticipate another release, but when it came, I knew what it was, and explained it to Mummy, Frances and Belle. The only difficulty was, I never knew if a cloudburst would strike when we were out. Sure enough, more than once it did.

‘I’m only crying because something wonderful just happened to me,’ I said to a dubious-looking waiter.

After a few weeks, the downpours stopped as suddenly as they had started. Although I was recuperating, I was fortunate in having inherited the constitution of an ox from both sides of the family. Moreover, I was eager to be out and leading a normal life as quickly as I could. So much of my time had been wasted that I had a heightened awareness of how precious the here and now is. Mummy and I used the two weeks we were together in New York to hit the high spots with Frances and Belle, and then we flew to Canada to stay with Sharman and Ken, who had settled in London, Ontario. Mummy returned to Jamaica from there, and I stayed on for another week.

In Canada, food ceased to be a problem. This was another relief, for there are few more dreadful sensations than dying of hunger and not being able to eat. In November 1970, I had to face my second irrevocable step. Unless my papers were legally changed, I did not possess the rights of a woman. I could not marry, and, should I ever have a problem with the law, I would be sent to a male prison. As an original birth certificate is a historic record, it could not be pulled out and replaced, but the British law allowed it to be amended upon presentation of a statutory declaration from two sources to reflect that a mistake had been made in 1949 and rectified two decades later.

I played no part in the process at all. The surgeon who performed the corrective surgery provided the first document; my parents the second. They needed to swear the statutory declaration in front of a justice of the peace, so they chose someone who was the soul of discretion: their old friend Mitry Seaga. Thereafter, it was up to the registrar of births, deaths and marriages in Jamaica to implement the correction. Anxious though I was to have my status confirmed, I did not necessarily have to return to Jamaica now or at any time in the future for that to be done. In fact, there were strong reasons for never going back at all. As long as I stayed away, there was less chance of precipitating the sensational newspaper publicity that Daddy, and now I, so dreaded.