I guess I started noticing things the summer I was 13. Before that time, I kept wishing and hoping and praying that I would wake up in the morning to find the last 12 years had been a dream…that I had only been dreaming I was a boy all that time. I prayed every night and I hoped that when I woke that I would be the girl I knew I should have been for as long as I could remember. It never happened and that summer my body would show me just how far from that dream I would be taken.

It began in the middle of the night. I woke up and thought I was dying. My heart was racing, I was breathing really fast and I thought I had wet the bed. When I calmed down, I knew something had happened but I wasn’t sure how or why. I tiptoed to the bathroom to clean myself up.  When I started to undress to clean myself up I realized that I hadn’t peed the bed. This was something else. I was so confused and embarrassed that I threw my underwear in the trash. I thought that I had gotten some terrible disease from a public rest room. No one ever talked about anything in my family. No one ever told me what I would go through as part of becoming a “man”.

So I never told anyone…but as time went on that summer more and more things started happening. Things that I had no control over. Things that I couldn’t stop. My body was betraying me in the worst possible way. I went to the library and found a book on human anatomy and development. That’s where I learned about the terrible stage of life I was going through.

I had begun puberty….

My body was at war with my mind. My body was bound and determined to turn me into a boy while my heart , mind and soul were screaming STOP! DON’T DO THIS! I’M A GIRL! CAN’T YOU SEE? I DON’T WANT ANY OF THIS! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T DO THIS!

The changes were a series of relentless, never ending reminders that God had forsaken me, That there was no hope of ever being a girl now. Every time I looked in the mirror and saw the changes taking place I just wanted to die. I wanted to just crawl in a hole somewhere and pull the earth over me and be done with all of it. I hated my hairy armpits, those hanging things that seemed to appear like magic, not to mention the gross hairy thing between my legs that had a mind of it’s own in the middle of the night. Can’t I just die now, please? I’m so embarrassed and ashamed of myself and everything that has happened to me, without my consent I might add, that I would really prefer to just go off somewhere and die. Things kept happening after that. I grew 13″ inches in 8 weeks and got scoliosis as bonus. I grew hair everywhere…everywhere, my armpits got smelly, my face and body got pimples and I started growing hair on my face! FOR FUCKS SAKE, CAN’T WE STOP NOW, PLEASE?

Oh My God, who is this person I see in the mirror? I have always hated you but now I can’t stand to look at you at all. I hate everything about you, How you look, how you sound, the way you walk, the way you smell, the way you act. Every thing that makes you MICHAEL. I look at you and I am completely depressed by all this. All these changes, everything I have had to endure. I want no part of this, of you and what you represent. I’m even more confused about where I belong. I’m pretty sure that I am the only person in the world that feels this way. Why did my life have to get so confusing and complicated? God must really hate me if this is the way he answered my prayers. Why else would he do this to me? I was graduating from grade school and my mother felt the need to buy me a suit to show me off to her friends. So that she could say “see, he turned out normal after all”

We kept moving around for the next few years. It seems that we moved about once a year or more often if needed due to fear of “Them”. We were all over the south side, Burnside, South Chicago, Woodlawn. You name a neighborhood, we probably lived for a time.

Then my mom heard from some of her coworkers “at the mill”, that the best neighborhood to live in was a community called the “East Side’. She said that she had heard that they were building a few houses in the area and she said that we might move into one. Three homes were being built on the corner of Avenue N and 97th street. When we went to look at the houses, I noticed that we were right across the street from a railroad yard! How cool was that?

My neighborhood was made famous in the movie “The Blue Brothers”. When you see all those weird railroad bridges over the Calumet river, the Skyway bridge, the 95th street bridge and all the other south side landmarks you know what my neighborhood looked liked.  Mom liked the center house and so she bought the house and the whole family moved. Mom, me, Granny, Gramps and my aunt Helen.

Something else I noticed,  there was a the park right across the street from our new house. The sign on the corner proudly proclaimed the name of the park…Pietrowski Playground. The name that all the kids gave it was “Dago Park”. I think it ended up with that name because the east side was a melting pot of every nationality you could think of. Everyone settled here because of the steel mills.  It was a little hole in the wall corner playground that had one side of a basketball court, one softball diamond (depending  on what time of the year it was), two sets of dilapidated swings, a teeter totter and a slide. Nestled in the center of this microcosm of kid fun as a a small field house that on any given day could provide softballs, bats, basketballs and all manner of athletic equipment for the use of the kids in surrounding neighborhood. This establishment was cared for by an elderly gentleman by the name of Carl. He made sure the kids had the equipment they needed and that they treated each other well.  Carl didn’t tolerate bullies or older kids taking advantage of the younger ones. Carl passed out all the equipment, made sure the ping pong table was in good working order and kept the field house clean. In the winter, Carl would flood Dago Park and turn it into a HUGE ice skating rink. There was always a hot fire going in the pot bellied stove inside the field house so you could warm up. Carl was a kind man. He took me under his wing when I first got there and did his best to not let the other kids push me around.  Dago park was a sanctuary for me when I was growing up. It gave me a place to go so I to didn’t have to go home…I hated going home. I hated being yelled at. When we lived in Burnside I would go up to the Illinois Central station and watch all the trains coming and going. I was perfectly happy to watch people come and go. It was a different time…no one ever asked me why I was there.  I was on a first name basis with all the ticket agents that worked there. Nobody yelled at me there. I think I was around 8.

It was the summer of 1958, mom informed me that in the fall I would be going to a catholic school called St. George. While I had passed the 4th at my old school, the nuns at St. George though it might be beneficial for me to repeat 4th grade when I started school. Mom said she was sure that the priests and nuns at St. George would be able to help me with my “problem” as she had begun referring to it. She said that she had told the sisters all about me and they had informed her that they could fix me.

St George had received some media attention because it was the first school to install a fully functional fire alarm system and conduct organized fire drills after the horrific Our Lady of the Angels school fire where 92 students and 3 nuns died during the fire. All the students were required to wear uniforms. My mom really liked this idea because she said I looked “normal”.

 I was never a great student. I’d grown up being told how stupid I was so I never felt smart enough to learn. I never realized I could be a good student until I was in my mid 30s.

The sisters of St. George were very adept at all forms of corporal punishment when it came to students. I learned to dread simple tools of the classroom like the rubber tipped pointer that sister would use during lessons to point out things on the blackboard. It was a very effective teaching tool when I had to kneel on it for 30 minutes at a time. Wooden rulers became great instructional devices when applied to the face, the back of hands or buttocks of the offending student. Kneeling in the dark coat closet while class continued was always fun. I was told that God does not make mistakes. That I was not worthy of receiving an answer from God or the Virgin Mary because I wasn’t devout enough.

So I prayed to Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. I became an altar boy, learned Latin and served mass several times a week. I know there was a part of me that liked being an altar boy because we wore such beautiful cassocks and supplice, I felt feminine whenever I served mass.  So I kept praying, I kept asking for the same two things. I got an answer of sorts one Sunday when I came in to serve 6 am mass and found one of the parish priests behind the altar with one of the other altar boys. They weren’t praying…

One Sunday, the priests had delivered a sermon talking about the dangers of gambling, alcohol use,  tobacco use and other sins against God and his church. They had admonished the parishioners to tithe more and to avoid the temptations of the flesh. The following Saturday, all the altar boys were tasked with scrubbing the marble floors of the church and sanctuary on our hands and knees. It took the 12 of us all day to do it. After we were done, Father Jerome, the pastor of St. George, called us all onto the back room of the rectory. He and the other priests of the parish welcomed us and told us what  great job we had done. They were watching a football game on a brand new color TV, they were playing poker, drinking beer and smoking cigars. They appeared to be having a great time. When I looked around the room I thought I had wandered into a bank vault because there was money everywhere! There were three pound coffee cans filled with change that were stacked up on shelves all around the room. There was large stacks of paper money stacked up on the shelves too. Father Jerome said that we could reach into any can of change we wanted and grab all the change we could carry in one hand as our payment for cleaning the floors of the church.

I started seeing things differently after that. The child who was convinced the God, The Blessed Virgin and His church could “fix” him began to have doubts. The child who knew if he just prayed harder, worked harder, was more devout hoping God would answer his one and only prayer gave up. The child who had thought of going to seminary and becoming a priest was gone. I had failed God, my family and everyone that loved me. God gave up on me and I gave up on God. I just wanted to die…

I hated the boy I saw in the mirror every day. I hated everything  about myself. The way I looked, my body, my voice. Every day, my body was letting me know that there were changes coming and that I was not going to be happy when they arrived.

D

When I was about 6,  mom decided that she would have to go to work full time. She said that dad had abandoned us and that she was going to have to find a job to keep the wolf from the door and food on the table. It wasn’t until I was older that the truth came out and I realized that all the terrible things she had said about dad were wrong.

In 1956, working women were unheard of.  All the men came back from WWII  and demanded their old jobs back. During the war, with all the able bodied men overseas fighting the Huns, women lead the workforce in the US, building tanks, planes,  trucks,  jeeps, bullets and bombs.  Many women were very disappointed to learn that they would not be able to keep their jobs after the war.  Mom found a job at US Steel Southworks in south chicago working in the billing department. She chose the afternoon shift 3:00 to 11:00 pm Monday – Friday.  I think she that shift because it limited the time she had to spend around me. When I got home from school, she was going to work,  when I got up to go to school,  she was asleep and was NOT to be disturbed under any circumstances. So,  the only time we really saw each other was on the weekends. During the week, my grandmother and my aunt would get me off to school and look after me when I got home after school. Looking back, I think that this was probably about the time my mom gave up on me ever being a person she could be proud of. I became someone who was tolerated or ignored.  After mom had been working for awhile, she started reminding me how much I owed her. The roof over my head, the clothes on my back, the food in my belly, the air that I breathed. She constantly told me how much money I cost her. As I started to grow, she would complain to me about how fat I was, how tall I was and why couldn’t I just fit in regular boy’s clothes instead of the tall boys clothing? When I looked back at the pictures of me back then I just looked like any other kid…nothing special.  She began comparing me to dad and tell me how I wasn’t worth anything and that I wasn’t smart enough to do well in school.  I have searched my memories and my soul my whole life and I can’t remember mom ever telling me she loved me or that she was proud of me. All I ever wanted when I was growing up was to be worthy in her eyes. I just couldn’t make her happy no matter why I did. When I was in school she was always working whenever there was a school recital or event. I think she was too ashamed of me to be seen with me at a public event especially if she might run into someone she worked with “at the mill”. I began to feel that I didn’t belong anywhere or with “normal” people of children. Later in life, when I could talk about this stuff, I would always say I felt like I was on the outside looking in …

Whenever I did manage to make a friend, I was never allowed to bring them over to my house. No one was ever welcome. Mom had picked Gramp’s habit of nicknaming everyone by their nationality. She’s say “don’t hang around with that damn dago kid he’s trouble” or “Why do you have to hang around that pollack kid he’s a juvenile delinquent”. Being invited to my friend’s homes showed me a world that I had never seen before. Until that time, I thought everyone acted like my family did. Until that time, I thought it was normal for family members to scream at one another, swear at one another, treat each other terribly. Visiting my friends , I learned that families could love each other, support each other, care about each other. I didn’t understand why my family was so different, why we hated each other so much. Why did we never say to each other;  “I Love You, You’re Wonderful, You did a great job, you’re so special” .

It must be because of me. I knew they would be a lot happier if I wasn’t around…

That had to be it, right?

 

We were all still living the in Gramp’s apartment building in the Burnside neighborhood. Dad was only coming home about twice a year now. He came home one summer and told mom he was being reassigned and he wanted us to come with him. He was being assigned to Germany for five years. He asked mom please come live with him in Germany. He said with his rank and all of his years of service that we could live like royalty. We wouldn’t have to live on post and we could have a house in town. He said that he wanted this more than anything in the world. Mom’s answer to his pleading was a loud, resounding NO. She had  thousand excuses…who will take care of my parents? I don’t know anyone in Germany. I don’t know how to speak the language! What will I do there? Where can we send our child to school? What will happen if my parents need me? When dad left after that furlough, it was the last time I saw him…

Gramps was a racist. In his opinion, the only people of worth in the world were people from Hungary, everyone else was inferior. And he had a pet name for everyone…spics, chinks, wops, polacks, dagos, kikes, taco benders, niggers, greasers the list was endless. I found this very interesting for a man who came to the USA in the 1900s. When he had risen to such a lofty position in society? The next year, gramps decided to sell the apartment building and we all moved into a smaller house on the near southwest side. Why? Because a black family had moved into the neighborhood. We moved a lot over the next few years…

When I was six, I broke my Mother’s heart again when I asked her for an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas.  I got a toy train instead. She was bound and determined to make me want to be a boy even if she killed me in the process. Every time she caught me in her closet, smelling her perfume, cleaning the bathroom, trying her lipstick, trying to cook, she would fly into a rage and grab whatever was close and beat me with it. The whole time she was hitting me she was screaming things like, “see what you made me do?”, “why are you so stupid?”, “I hate you”. I apologized a lot as kid because I knew (probably from being told all the time) that whatever was happening was my fault. My standard defensive position was duck, cover and apologize for whatever I had done…

It seemed to me that no matter what I was doing or how hard I tried, it was never quite good enough for my mom. I think the only time I made her proud during those years is went I had my first Holy Communion.

And in case you wondered, I was the one that tried to scratch out my face on the first communion photo. That kid didn’t look like the girl who lived in my heart.

But I digress…

Margaret Ann Hanko was convinced she was going to die the spinster daughter and never find love. She stood 5’9″ tall, pretty in her own way and was more muscular than most girls back then because of her job. She worked as a nurse in a TB Sanitarium in Oak Forest, IL caring for terminally ill Tuberculosis patients. She was well past marrying age for that time, being 34 and all, so she had resigned herself to live and die alone. She still lived with her parents on 92nd street.  A bit of an introvert, she threw caution to the wind one night deciding to go to a USO dance being held in downtown Chicago with her sister in the spring of 1948.

It was at that dance that she met the GI who would make her believe in love at first sight and become my Father. Her cloistered, unhappy life would never be the same… His name, she would find out after their first dance, was Ray. The Ray was short for Raymond.  Raymond Abner Mallo had just come back after serving his country in the European theater during World War II. He was stationed at 5th Army headquarters in Chicago’s Hyde Park district. Dad held the rank of Tech Sergeant , not bad for a guy from Rice Lake, Wisconsin who was only 35. He was a Military Policeman, who was attached to the Provost Marshall’s office at 5th Army. He stood 6’2″ and looked pretty damn good in his dress uniform when he first met Marge. From that night on, they only had eyes for each other. After a whirlwind courtship Marge married Ray in the summer of 1948.

I came along to ruin their lives in the spring of 1949. Shortly after I was born, my dad was reassigned to a detachment of military police in New York City tasked with apprehending deserters and Army personnel who went AWOL (away with out leave). Mom was very upset when Dad was reassigned to New York and had to leave us.

After a while, she felt that dad had deserted us and that he had left her to raise their screwed up son by herself. Dad came home on furlough (leave) as much as he could but things were starting to be different. Mom would complain to Granny about how unfair things had gotten since he had left and then she would normally finish the conversation  by looking at me and saying “And just what the hell am I supposed to do about that”? Even when he came home on leave she wasn’t as happy to see him and she made that very clear the whole time he was there. Slowly but surely, the period of time between Dad’s visits got longer and longer.

I was sure all of it was my fault because I was so screwed up. Dad didn’t come home as much because his son Michael believed in her heart that she was a girl.  I was the reason that Mom was so angry and unhappy all the time and it was my fault that the way she chose to communicate with her family was by screaming at the top of her lungs at them. I was the reason that Gramps was a chronic alcoholic and that Granny had huge weeping sores on her legs from the tops of her thighs to her ankles and was in constant pain.

I grew up feeling that I was responsible for all the pain in my family. I think I was 6 at the time….

Our family was a lot like most first generation immigrant families migrating from Eastern Europe as the War in Europe began. My Grandparents had fled Hungary after World War 1. They landed in New York and slowly moved west to Chicago where my Grandfather found work at the US Steel Southworks as a welder and pipe fitter. He bought an apartment building on E. 92nd street on the south side and wanted to keep all the family together under one roof. My grandparents lived on the first floor. We lived on the second and my aunt and her husband lived in the basement. My Mother was raised a devout Roman Catholic. I was baptized at St Joachim and we went to High Mass every Sunday. My Mother went to the priest in our parish asking “how have I offended our Almighty Father, the Blessed Virgin and all the Saints to have been burdened with a child such as this”? I don’t know what to do with him. He tells me that he wants to be a girl! He follows me around in the kitchen and wants me to teach him to cook! He says he hates being a boy and he doesn’t want to be a boy. He asks me to fix him and I don’t know what to do. I have prayed asking the Almighty for guidance but I have not heard God speak to me. What should I do???

The priest told my Mother that she was a failure in the eyes of Our Lord and a failure as a Catholic woman and a Mother because she allowed this to happen. He told her the reason I wanted to be a girl was because she had not disciplined me enough. Looking back at those years, for my Mother, it was like Jesus talking to her through the priest. This testament was not to be questioned only accepted. So, for the next 14 years my Mother tried to beat the girl out of me…It never worked but it certainly made life interesting.

On a side note…I was also a very devout Catholic as a child. I went to bed every night and prayed to God and Virgin Mary for one of two things. Please fix me and make me a girl or show me how to accept who I was and learn to live with it. I never got any answers. Over and over and over, I tried to accept that I was a boy. I would try to lock up all those feminine feelings, those feelings I had that I wasn’t made right, that I was a mistake, that in my Mother’s words ” I was all screwed up”, that there would never be any hope or happiness for me. That I had not only screwed up my life but that I had single handedly screwed up the lives of my entire family.