More on Middle Initials and Transsexualism

I have probably revealed here many times that I was substantially premature, and spent the first several weeks of my life in an incubator. My mother told me that when I was allowed to come home, I ate quite frantically, as though I’d become accustomed to being fed impatiently. To this day, I eat more quickly than anyone I know. Do you think this anecdote makes me look fat?

What I probably haven’t revealed here is that I was one of a pair of identical twins. My dad was a struggling medical illustrator at the time of my birth, and my mother a reluctant young homemaker, and they didn’t see how they’d be able to keep both me and my brother Joseph, so they took us over to the home of their next door neighbors Wayne and Irma Schultz, who they knew had been trying to conceive, and asked if they’d be interested in one of us. Transracial adoption wasn’t nearly as fashionable in those benighted times as it is today, and Wayne was apparently bitterly opposed to having a Jewish child, but Irma prevailed, and there went Joey, as I probably would have called him in childhood.

We have spoken before about my deep loathing of middle initials when used solely to make the user appear to be of the managerial class, but I don’t think I’ve admitted to a comparable level of annoyance at women (and it’s nearly always women who do it) who call their husbands by the names on their birth certificates, though no one else on earth does. You may, if you’re old enough — and let’s not kid ourselves about your being abundantly old enough — recall that the actress and folk rock singer Cher never referred to her second husband, Mr. Allman, as anything other than Gregory, though he was nothing but Gregg to anyone else on the face of the earth.

A decade or so after that, she gave an interview in which she kept referring to her male co-star in the movie she was making as Nicky, though I have never heard the second worst actor of his generation referred to as anything other than Nicolas (Cage). It was apparently Cher’s intention to suggest that she had very special relationships of the sort you or I could never understand with these guys, and it made my flesh crawl, though all was forgiven when she strutted around with defiant sluttishness in spite of her age on that aircraft carrier in the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Va-va-voom!

I further applaud Cher — who I always thought was trying, whether she knew it or not, to sound like Al Jolson — for supporting her first child’s decision to change sexes. A lot more people than is commonly supposed spend their whole lives feeling trapped in the wrong body, which can’t be a pleasurable feeling. In the wine country, Claire and I knew a transsexual called Gina, a checker at a Safeway in affluent Marin County, who had something like six children, three of them triplets, and clearly adored them. To hear her wife tell it, though, Gina was just trying to be difficult.

I think about her often when I hear New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi refer to outfielder Brett Gardner as “Gardy,” which makes me cringe for its stupidness. But I suppose I should be grateful that we don’t in this country infantilize monosyllabic surnames, as the Brits so love to do. Wattsy, you see, or Jonesy.

Be all of that as it may, I realized I had an identical twin only after I got heavy into Facebook around 18 months ago and Joe sent me a friend request. His profile photo showed him to look a lot like me, but without the artificially blond hair and the deep furrows that care has etched into my once-handsome punim. He’s some sort of middle manager in a corporation, and uses his middle initial — D — in what he blithely admits is an attempt to appear more promotable. When we met for lunch, he turned out to eat very slowly, and all we could surmise is that he’d somehow been less premature than I, though of course we were born mere moments apart.

The S in Harry S Truman didn’t stand for anything. You’d have thought a US president wouldn’t have felt it necessary to try to appear more promotable. But those, of course, were simpler times.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]