Our Neighborhood Transvestite

     Ryan Deegan.  He was a cool guy, actually.  He used to play catch with us from his front lawn to one of ours so the throws of the softball covered a long distance.  He lived alone in a house that looked pretty much like everyone else's.  We had the most fun on his motorcycle. Loud and powerful.  Not a "motorbike," or any pansy variant like that.  He'd take us on a ride, one thrilled kid at a time.  I think he was retired but I don't know from what. He was hard of hearing and so the tunes he like blared from his high-fi system through his open living room windows in warm weather. 
     Ryan owned one of the first television sets in our neighborhood.  We kids would go over his house to see "Time for Beaney." a puppet show about a young boy who wore a "beanie" cap,  his friend "Cecil the Sea Serpent, " and the adventures they had with other characters such as Dishonest John.  At 7p.m. we'd holler "Time for 'Time for Beaney, ' " and run to Ryan's house. (I was the one who insisted on the repetition of the phrase--the seeds of a snotty little grammarian taking root early.)  We didn't just barge in on him.  Our arrival was by prearranged invitation extended to our parents.  And Ryan had his rules. 
     You could not arrive late to the Deegan house.  You had to have your hair combed.  You could not wear tennis shoes (they took up the nap of the rug).  We considered these strictures odd, but we followed them because we wanted to watch TV.
     What we did not know was that Ryan was "odd" in a more dramatic way than any eccentricities that we observed.  His singularity defeated our parents' desire to tell us the truth about Ryan.  Therefore they said nothing while we were small.  When we all got a little older we started to notice some things in and around his house that puzzled us.
     When our next door neighbors were on vacation I had the job of collecting their newspapers and mail, feeding the cat and watering the lawn and the plants.  Their back yard was separated from the Deegan back yard by a stone wall about five feet high.  On Ryan's side of the wall was his driveway that extended into his garage.  One afternoon, I heard his car pull in and the door open.  I glanced at the top of the wall and glimpsed a lady's blue hat.  The face of the hat wearer was obscured by a wispy veil, and then went out of sight as the person turned and moved from the car to the house. 
     A couple of weeks later I was riding my bike down the sidewalk.  As I passed Ryan's house I looked into his driveway.  I saw a woman watering plants by the side of the house.  I identified the person as a woman because she was garbed in a two piece bathing suit.  I wondered who she was.  So the next day at breakfast I asked my mother, "Is there a woman living in Ryan's house?"
     I thought she was going to choke on her toast.  I told her what I had seen.  She gathered herself and said: "That was not a woman you saw.  That was Ryan dressed like a woman."  The cat was out of the bag.
      My Mom didn't realize I was satisfied with that answer.  I was surprised; I thought it was strange but I did not ask why he did that.  She launched into an explanation nonetheless.    And her explanation was a mess.  She didn't have the words "transvestite" or "cross-dresser" in her active vocabulary.  She told me that there were some people who had "the top of a woman" and "the bottom of a man."  She was standing up as she spoke.  She emitted an "Eww" and then thrust her joined hands into her nether regions in a kind of spastic mimicry of pain or desire.  I wanted to flee the room.
     Over the years I learned more about Ryan.  Mrs. McCormick of the people next door talked with him about his cross-dressing behavior.  He quite calmly explained it was his hobby.  He drew a comparison to Mr. McCormick's enjoyment of fishing.  "Your husband has his hobby.  I have mine."  Later, when I was much older their daughter laughed as she told me this tidbit.  Her bedroom was on the side of their house adjacent to Ryan's living room.  When Ryan's windows were open, she would be regaled with different recordings of his theme song: "I Enjoy Being A Girl!" 
     Nothing that Ryan did or said was illegal, immoral or threatening.  We heard tell of a woman's lingerie shop one town over that catered to his garment preferences.  Good customer.  They kept a small closet available for him as a personal dressing room.  In a sense he was already out of the closet.
    Nice fella.  A dude with an unusual dandy--for the 1950s.  Always treated us well.  Did no harm.  Just a memory from years ago. 
    Now, where did I put my lipstick?
 

   

A Girl I Can't Forget

     Not everyone is found or findable on Facebook.  Not even Google can produce the goods on all who are or were in our lives.  Who hasn't dithered with searches that were fruitless and been puzzled that a trail can go cold.  I have not been able to locate the second smartest person I ever met; one of the groomsmen at my wedding; a colleague from my Great Books days who was one of the best on-her-feet-presenters in front of a group you could imagine; and a recent teaching colleague who said repeatedly before he retired that "we'll stay in touch, we'll have coffee."  Yeah, right.
     I have reason to believe that all of these folks are alive and well.  They just do not want to be found (and not only by me; others who have looked have also come up empty.)  I have to admire their ability to cloak and cloister themselves, apparently without the resources of the witness protection program.  Perhaps part of the answer to the puzzle is in the thought I expressed last year to my siblings when we were discussing how well or how little we knew our deceased sister.  "I think each of us got to know her as much as she wanted us to." 
     There is a force, however, that retrieves the traces of faded friends, be they living or dead.  Memory.  No computer needed.  Memory creates the pull of the past and and makes possible the backward reach that lifts others into the now.  All of this was focused for me when I came upon a  quiet and modest piece I wrote in my "salad days" ("when I was green in judgement," Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra).  I published it in the college literary magazine I edited. Here it is, unchanged from that time.

          "And your prayers are requested for the repose of the soul of Miss Donna Hoffman,
          who was killed last night in a traffic accident.  The Rosary will be held . . . "
          
          And that was how I heard of it, quietly and simply, in church, announced from the
          pulpit by the sympathetic voice of the priest.  I remember feeling surprised, and a
          little lump forming at the bottom of my stomach, and a vague fright spreading
          through me like a rush of cold air. 

          We had gone to grade school together and had a crush on each other then.  She
          was thin and wiry with a square face and her eyes were always bright blue with
          defiance.  We were often sarcastic with one another as was the code of our
          adolescence, but we laughed a lot, mostly at our classmates and seldom at our-
          selves.  She would call me up on the phone and we would talk for an awfully long
          time, and I remember little things--like how you could hang up and not break the
          connection if the other person held the receiver, and I remember her telling me
          about some guy she went tobogganing with. 

          She was quick and intelligent and I remember a cute little essay she wrote once
          about a penny and a dollar and I thought it was terribly original until a few years
          later when I read the story somewhere else and had a good laugh, remembering
          her version.

          The nun who taught us once remarked that she was the only girl in the class who
          had a "natural beauty" and I readily agreed because that phrase set her apart and
          somehow explained the electric feeling I got one day when she bumped into me in
          the aisle and her hand brushed my leg. 

          But then we left and went to different schools and lost contact and it wasn't until
          college that I remembered seeing her again and then it was only casually, socially,
          little more than "hello" and "goodbye."  I do remember seeing her one night walking
          by the dorms with a guy, holding hands, and she looked up and said, "Hello, Mike"
          and the light caught her face and there was something different there, something
          gone.

          Then later, at a big dance, some of the fraternity men got to fooling around with the
          microphone between numbers and a deep experienced voice announced her name
          and wished her happy birthday and I knew then that she had "arrived" in the social
          circle and was beyond reach forever.  Not long before her death I was talking with
          a friend of mine who knew her also and he showed me a picture he had of her. He
          began to talk of how she was "messed up" psychologically, and he started to tell a
          lot of wild stories he had heard . . . but I closed my ears to his voice because that
          was not the girl I knew, not the girl I remembered.

          I am looking now at the picture he had, and it is really not a very good one for she
          was much prettier than she is shown here.  She looks a little scared, timid almost
          but if you look closely you can see the bright look defiance in her eyes which the
          thing I remember most. 

          And I'm really not sure why I wrote this; it's a strange kind of obituary you'll agree,
          but at least it gives form to a memory if nothing else. And though her death really
          was a terrible thing it would be infinitely worse to erase the thought of it and com-
          fortably forget about her.  I am grateful for the brief childhood friendship we had
          and for the vivid memory of her which lingers in my mind . . . the bright blue look
          of defiance.