If You Only Knew (12 page)

CHAPTER 28

THE TONE INSIDE THE
vehicle during the drive to the restaurant took on an ominous air after Danny Chahine, however jokingly, asked his girlfriend if she and her aunt were planning to kill him now that he knew their secret.

Vonlee shrugged it off and was more interested in talking about how bad she felt. How deeply sorry she was that she had been involved at all. The way she described her contribution to what was, effectively, a murder, there was no doubt she felt responsible in some way and it was slowly beginning to control her every waking hour.

“I . . . I think about it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If I feel one little bit of happiness, I feel guilty for killing him. . . . If I got struck down by lightning right now, I deserve anything I get.”

Was it guilt? Was it worry and dread? Was it concern? Was she afraid of going to prison?

Danny didn't know what to say. “I hear you,” he repeated four times before adding, “I'm an outsider.”

“But I cannot go the rest of my life. I have asked God to forgive me and I've prayed every night and I know what I did is wrong. And I'm like, ‘Whatever you feel is right, God, do it. I mean, whatever you need.'”

Danny kept saying he was an outsider looking in; he couldn't imagine how she felt. He only knew that a man had died and the victim's wife had been the driving force behind the death.

Vonlee started to cry as she broke into a lengthy story of her life and how things had never really worked out for her the way in which she had ever planned. She spoke of God and her belief that, inherently, she had been a good person. All she wanted was for her “life to get together.” She talked about how she was constantly asking God for a way out of this latest mess. “Show me a way so I can have my surgery and have a normal life,” she told Danny. Seemingly justifying the crime, she then added: “I asked God and so maybe He was getting ready to take Don, anyway, and . . . He gave me an opportunity to get my life together? I don't know. But that's what . . . kind of comes to me—because everything is falling into place for me.”

Carrying on, Vonlee next explained how, since Don was gone, her life was falling into order in ways she could have never dreamed. Vonlee said she had just met a woman who wanted “to do the beauty salon thing with me.” She wrestled with the idea that if she had done anything wrong, then “bad things should be happening to me. Not good things. But I have asked for forgiveness and, I mean, I think He knows that I'm . . . that I'm a
good
person.... He knows that what happened to me was that I was a victim. I really think
I
was a victim. I really do. Everything that was going on, I mean, she knew how bad I wanted my surgery. She knew how fucked up I was about telling you my situation.... You know, I mean, I was just crazy. I mean, she could've stopped it. She could've just said ‘no.'”

Danny needed a narrative of what happened. Vonlee was talking, and that was good. She was admitting her role in the crime and telling him—as she had suspected, he was recording everything—how the crime came to be, unknowingly drowning herself.

She mentioned how when her aunt first brought up the idea of killing Don, Vonlee believed it was a joke. “Then she says, ‘I'll give you money' . . . and I, honest to God, just thought it was a big old joke at first. And then she got real serious, and then after she really got into it . . . [and said], ‘Well, we can't stop now. He'll know we were killing him.'” Vonlee paused, then changed her thought and was back to asking Danny to support her: “Okay. But you just have got to not, I mean, you've got to understand, if we're going to be friends or whatever, that this is not something . . . I'm not that type of person. I mean, I'm not.”

“I know you're not,” Danny said.

The drive from Troy to Detroit with traffic was a solid hour. Vonlee had opened up. She spoke of her motives for not wanting Don dead, but also what the future without him held for her: a beauty salon and her full transformation into a female, totally complete, with the final operation.

Danny tried to convince Vonlee that she and her aunt had participated in a “mercy killing,” as he put it.

Vonlee didn't think so at first, but Danny persisted.

Then she talked about how Don “was ready to go,” anyway. She had even considered that he did have a heart attack that night, which might have been the reason for him falling onto the floor. Vonlee had even told Billie Jean how close to death she once thought Don was; he bled all the time, Vonlee said, quite clearly justifying his death for her own spiritual benefit.

They then got onto the subject of Billie Jean's true motivation and Vonlee tried to come up with a reason why her aunt wanted Don dead. Danny made a point when he asked why they had not waited until Don died, suffice it to say if he was so close to death? Danny was curious. Don was sick and bleeding from his rectum and knocking on death's door. Why push him over the edge and risk prison if Billie Jean only had to wait a little longer?

“She may have been tired of cleaning up blood . . . ,” Vonlee responded. “She may have been tired of him trying to grab everybody's . . . my ass every time he turned around, or my tits, which he was. She may have been tired of him drinking to the point of where they couldn't go on vacation or anything. . . .”

“She lived with him for
sixteen
years,” Danny said, making a good point.

“She put up with it,” Vonlee said.

“You had to kill an old person?” Danny asked, raising his voice a bit. “An old person! He's dying! Why would you kill somebody that's dying? You see, you . . . Look what you're doing to yourself and look what she's doing to herself. The guy was dying!”

This comment made Vonlee mad. She said she didn't need any bullshit from Danny right at that moment. She was torturing herself enough over what had happened.

They argued about this for quite some time. Then Danny became impatient and said: “Let's find the restaurant, please. I need a drink. I'm ready to collapse. I need a drink.”

Vonlee was talking more to herself when she then said: “I don't know why! It was not the money. I didn't even think I was going to get no hundred thousand dollars. I thought she was going to give me, I mean, I started, was like joking. You think I'd kill somebody for twenty-five thousand dollars? Fuck no! Twenty-five thousand dollars can't even buy you a car.”

“I know.”

“I can make that in a month . . . ,” Vonlee said, meaning with her escort business.

“I know.”

There was a lull in the conversation and they continued talking as Danny realized he was lost. Vonlee had been talking about what her aunt did after the police left on that day of Don's death.

“I'm lost. I'm lost. I need, we need to . . . stop at the gas station.”

This was a new restaurant near the casino they had never eaten at before and Danny was having trouble finding it. Or so he claimed.

They found their way after stopping and asking someone for directions as a bit of an argument began. Vonlee said, “You can't flip out. And don't you tell
anybody
anything.”

Vonlee was now paranoid. She began looking around the inside of Danny's truck, lifting up things and searching through the glove compartment to see if he was hiding some sort of recording device.

“I don't . . . trust anybody with anything. You got a tape recorder in here?” she asked.

“You're weirding out. You're just freaking out on me. You're freaking out on me.”

Vonlee decided she didn't want to talk about Don's murder anymore. She wanted to go back home.

“I'm taking you to dinner . . . ,” Danny insisted.

“I'm searching this truck to make sure there's nothing in here.”

As Danny pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, they discussed how “small” the place looked and Danny suggested that if they didn't like the look of the menu, they could go somewhere else.

Without warning, Vonlee then turned the conversation back to death. “Well, I've lost about—” she began to say.

“Five friends from drugs?” Danny finished.

“No, um, from AIDS.”

“Oh, AIDS?”

“They died of AIDS.”

“Now you're scaring
me . . . ,
” he said.

“Why?”

“Shit,” Danny said.

“I don't have it.”

“Oh, God,” Danny said, realizing he'd had anal sex with Vonlee on a number of occasions.

“You don't have to worry about it,” Vonlee said reassuringly.

They both got out of the truck. Slammed the doors—and were now out of earshot of the recording/listening device strapped underneath the driver's-side seat of Danny's vehicle.

CHAPTER 29

HARRY VONLEE TITLOW FELT
like a girl all her life. There was never any question about her gender in Vonlee's heart, mind or, for that matter, body. For as long as she could recall, Vonlee felt, thought and acted as if she had been born a female in a male body. Photos from early childhood depict a charming, cute baby. School photos from Harry's grammar school years show a boy with dirty blond hair, which was straight and thin and a little long, blue eyes, with a look of clarity and even happiness on his young face. Harry/Vonlee was one of those children you look at and can see either gender in the subtlety of his/her features. In the few school photos that still exist, Harry seems like a content child, smiling; his arms are folded in front of himself, his boyish qualities very much obvious because of the choice of clothing and hairstyle. Yet, you look closely and you see something different about this young person; there is something delicately effeminate and altogether natural. You see a girl inside.

Vonlee grew up in the town of Maryville, Tennessee, in a neighborhood known as Vestal of about two thousand souls, give or take. Just south of Knoxville, Vestal is low-rent, low-cost housing. It's a neighborhood atmosphere, where people hang out during the warmer months on their front porches, praise God on Sundays, bring food to the neighbors when a loved one passes and wonder what life is like for those with the means and money to live worry-free.

“Since she came from pauper roots,” said one local who knew Vonlee well, “she had nothing but dollar signs in her eyes all her life. I'm betting the first time some dude paid her for her time as an escort, there was no stopping her. That was her way out and she probably looked up to Billie for making it out of this shitty little town.... I know people raised there in that same small community where Vonlee, her mom, and Billie were all raised, and it is still very much rough and tumble. Prospects for a life outside of Vestal are slim for a lot of people there, and Billie made it out probably like no other.”

For the most part, Vonlee insisted, “My grandmother raised me.” They lived in what she called a “very country setting.” This was the South, where people spoke with a noticeable drawl, listened to old-school country music—Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and the like—and rode big green tractors to the neighborhood store when they didn't have a vehicle. Chickens. Gardens. Red barns. Fences in need of repair. Dirt roads. Blue jeans. Cowboy boots. Chewing tobacco. Rolling hills of acreage available for farming.

Every country cliché you can imagine packed into one setting.

That was Vestal and its surrounding communities.

It was hard later for Vonlee to answer the question of what she and the local kids did for fun, because there wasn't much to do in the area during the early 1970s when she was coming of age. Knoxville, although not far away, seemed to be in another world. And Nashville, forget it: off-limits to these kids living in modest homes passed down from generation to generation.

“We played house, dolls and dollhouses,” Vonlee recalled. She'd never had a tool bench, a Hot Wheels car or a holster and cap gun; Vonlee had a Betty Crocker oven and Barbie dolls.

On some nights, the kids would all gather in a field somewhere and use glass jars to run around and capture fireflies.

“In the South,” she added, “that's the big thing kids do—catch lightning bugs.”

It was during this time, when she was seven or thereabouts, maybe a little older, when Vonlee began to realize not that she was different, but people that had not known her all her life were perceiving her as being different.

“I'm the mother,” she'd say when one of the kids suggested playing house.

“Okay.”

There was never any question, really, among the kids. It seemed right for Vonlee to play the role of the female.

She would always want to play the female in whatever imaginative game or situation they found themselves involved in.

It was a life back then, so different from today, when a child's world revolved around being outside all the time, not sitting on the couch, eyes glued to a computer, electronic gadget or video game. You made your own fun. It was innocence at its core. There were no rules. You were confined only to the scope of your imagination.

“We played hard and didn't go in until we were forced to.”

Even back then, as a youngster, everyone called her Vonlee, she said. It was never Harry. Harry seemed so foreign and unlike a child's name, anyway. She had been named after a cousin “Vonray” and her grandmother “Annis Lee,” her mother taking the “Von” and “Lee” and putting them together.

“It stuck,” she said. “Plus, it was a cross-gender name. I still love it.”

One might wonder when it was Vonlee herself felt different, or had an inclination that there was something different about her.

“I have always just known,” she recalled.

Vonlee said she believes her mother and grandmother “knew [from my] very young age” that she was a female living inside a male's body. The reason why she moved in with her grandmother around this time was not something Vonlee wanted to go into detail about, she insisted, although moving in with her grandmother, she said, was just easier. It was not that Georgia wanted to toss Vonlee out and despised her child for the way in which she was born, but rather Vonlee's grandmother was more accepting and understood Vonlee better. It took a while for Georgia to accept that Vonlee was not a boy and that she would likely go on in life and live as a female.

“Everywhere I went with them,” Vonlee explained, “even as young as I can recall, people would say ‘she.' ‘Can “she” come with us? Can “she” come out and play?' ”

No one in her immediate circle referred to Vonlee as a boy. But Georgia would “get very irate and sharp with the person” that referred to her son as a “she.” This caused the beginning of a wedge to be driven between a mother and her child.

“She kind of went off on them if they said anything like that,” Vonlee remembered. “And she kind of would take it out on me, too. Whereas my grandmother just
loved
me. She understood me. She let me play with the dolls. She let me grow my hair and wear nightgowns to bed. She let me
be
a little girl. Thank God I had her in my life.”

Part of it was that Georgia was “one of these women where everything is going to be perfect,” Vonlee explained. “You ever seen the movie
Mommie Dearest . . .
well, there you are. She was under the belief that there was a place for everything, and everything better fall into that place.”

It wasn't that Vonlee wanted to come across as if she was disparaging her mother and the way in which she was raised. She loved her mother dearly, she insisted.

“But I just don't think she could cope with the fact that she knew who I was.”

Vonlee's father had been in Vietnam when Vonlee was born and she was too young to remember him.

“I've never met him,” Vonlee said. “I know who he is, but I don't . . . I just don't know what to say about that.”

Her father wanted to see Vonlee, but Georgia would not allow it. He would come over when Vonlee was young and leave presents, but Georgia would always send them back. It was almost as if Georgia knew that Vonlee was “different” and didn't want the father to see her.

Living life as a girl when not in school was not a big problem, Vonlee said. There were obstacles, sure; but mostly, she had the support of her grandmother and her friends. Her aunts and uncles and cousins all accepted her and never made much of an issue about it. Vonlee wasn't the freak of the family in any way. She wasn't the secret everyone whispered about. She was Vonlee. It wasn't something they all spoke about, but it was there, out in the open. Still, nobody judged; nobody said much of anything. She wasn't running around the neighborhood in skirts and girl clothes and makeup. Vonlee wore mainly boys' clothes (to a certain extent), but there was a strong sense of her being a tomboy, as if she were a girl pretending to be a boy.

That certainly wasn't the case as Vonlee turned twelve and thirteen and entered middle school and then high school. It was then that she'd have to make a choice: Could she live the way she felt and pay the consequences of public bullying and discrimination and even homophobia (although, Vonlee made a point to say, she never once considered herself ever to be a homosexual)? Or could she go to school as a boy and wait until she was old and mature enough, out of school, to pick up her life as a female again?

What would she do?