Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Fifty-Nine

"Mr. Harambe sir, tell us, if you don't mind, how you feel about why my client is here."

But Harambe would not be rushed.

"In due time, son. Take your seat now. I'll get to you."

More chuckles and titters. But no one objected and no one scolded him this time around. Not even Judge Fogg.

"To be like me in 1961 Los Angeles was dangerous. But it was less so about my ethnic mix, olive skin, and straight hair."

Persistent if he was nothing else, Phillips' lawyer chimed in again, ignoring the elderly man's caveat that his racial makeup hadn't been as big a problem as one might assume.

"Was it difficult being a black man, a multiracial man in Southern California, at that time, sir?"

Harambe shook his head, visibly exasperated. It was the first sign of him losing his cool this strange afternoon.

"I told you – told you all – that no, it wasn't that difficult. Frankly, I was so often assumed to be Hispanic, given my appearance, that my treatment in that part of the country was no better or worse than that of any other person of color."

The lawyer looked confused but forged ahead. "Well, uh, what was difficult for you then? I mean, was there a difficult element to being a young black man in California at that time?"

Harambe took a deep breath, regained his composure, and smiled sadly.

"No sir, No matter how many ways or times you ask, I can't tell you how tough it was to be a young black man in Los Angeles at that point in my life because, at that point in my life, I was a young black woman."

Pens literally did drop in Judge Gwendolyn Fogg's courtroom when K'waisi Harambe revealed that he had been born Kimberly Brown-Haupt in Arizona, back in the day.

Even the most seasoned journalists from the world's most vaunted news outlets had not seen this twist coming in the old gent's testimony.

But they had to contain themselves because he was not quite done. Run out of the courtroom and phone, text, and email breaking news updates to their newsrooms? Stay in and break Harambe's powerful revelation via Twitter or Facebook? Or just take notes and wait for another shoe to drop? What to do, what to do?

Most remained in their seats, whipped out their phones, and Tweeted the news that the elderly mystery man who'd seemingly come from nowhere to bolster Phillips' case was transsexual.

Unmoved by the quiet fuss taking place in front of him and determined not to wait for the flabbergasted attorney to find his tongue, Harambe continued speaking.

Perhaps the only two people not in shock over what they'd just heard were Phillips and Judge Fogg, herself. Both bore different versions of the same facial expression – something of a smile, something of a smirk.

"Today, we refer to people like me as transsexual," Harambe continued, unfazed. "Back then, we were simply called deviants and crazy. If found out, we would be forcibly taken into police custody, hustled off to a private hospital somewhere, and given lobotomies meant to stem our unnatural feelings."

Harambe held his fingers up in air quotes as he said "private hospital" and "unnatural."

He explained that as dangerous as early 1960s Los Angeles could be for people of color, it was a progressive city for its time.

And people seeking radical physical change, like gender reassignment surgery could get the work done in nondescript clinics whose services may have been technically legal –as even the most prudish legislators at the time hadn't imagined they needed to pass laws banning such activity– but were not advertised.

"After finding several other young men and women of my ilk –we gravitated to one another. To this day, in a city that size, I cannot tell you how we found one another. We just did– we found shelter, a safe haven in the home of an elderly woman in East Los Angeles. She had lost her only son to suicide after he gave up on life, tired of walking in the shadows and having to work full-time at pretending to be who he wasn't. She felt guilty that she hadn't been able to help her son. And so she took in young people like him and helped us come to peace with ourselves."

Harambe's guardian angel had helped him and his new friends find work as cooks, aides, and guest processors in a series of homeless and battered spouse shelters. And when he had saved enough money, she took him to a white stucco building that appeared on the outside to be an unfinished apartment building – unfinished as in construction on the building seemed incomplete.

Inside, though, was a busy ecosystem – men and women in doctors and nurses garb darting this way and that, carrying patient charts and wearing stethoscopes. There was even a reception/triage area just like in any "normal" clinic or hospital admissions room.

"The clinic was a partnership – a female psychologist and a couple, two gay male surgeons who were partners in both life and business," Harambe said. "That was my first visit. I spent one-hour consulting with the three of them, followed by one hour with the psychologist. They then started me on a hormone replacement therapy regimen, which I stayed on for months while visiting with the psychologist twice a week for counseling before they performed my surgery."

Harambe was lucky. Sex reassignment surgery was a relatively new procedure at the time. The first female-to-male procedure had just been performed in 1959 by a doctor named Woudstra. And both of Harambe's eventual surgeons had studied under Wouldstra in the Netherlands.

Also, in more recent years, people who profess a desire for sex reassignment are typically compelled to wait an extended period before having surgery, until after they've been subjected to a battery of mental health and emotional "tests" to ensure they know what they're doing. Such "safeguards" weren't in place. And after just weeks of conversations with the psychologist, Harambe was cleared to proceed.

"It took some time, but I recovered well and eventually began my new life as Luther Haupt. My paternal grandfather's first name was Lothar. I thought Luther was a good semblance of that and even had a little soul flare to it since I was now a black man!"

The tense courtroom tittered again at Harambe's logic. But the reaction was one of endearing.

He fell in love once or twice and even had a couple of long-term relationships before deciding Southern California was not for him.

"I had heard wonderful things about Chicago as a progressive bastion, and so I made my way here."

Harambe paused. The courtroom waited.

"I really only have a couple more things to say," he continued. "I changed my name to Harambe in July of 1972 to mark the five-year anniversary of the 1967 race riots that struck across the nation on the same days. The riots were the result of frustration from desperate people who weren't being treated fairly. They were criminalized for simply being, while at the same time not allowed to be. I knew what it was like to be prohibited by society itself from living as you needed to live. I got involved in this city's civil rights fight. And I decided to complete my transformation, though it was years in the making, by changing my name to K'waisi Harambe. It means in the Chadian dialect of Hausa, 'Do not hide.' It completed the process of being the real me, all of me that day. No more hiding. I tell you, leave this boy be."

Harambe pointed a bony finger at Phillips as he uttered that last line.

And with that, the old man was done. He did not wait to be excused, further questioned, or cross-examined. Instead, he turned to Judge Fogg, nodded and smiled gently, thanked her for her time, and strode out of the courtroom, back straight, head up, cane in hand, and ignoring the frantic whispers and soft dings of a raft of social media posts.

The judge did not try to stop him and ordered her bailiff to stand down as well.