The Triangle

But it wasn't all roses that year. The country was going through a massive shockwave: half a million troops in Viet Nam, the assassinations of Dr. King and RFK, the bloody police riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, topped off by the return from the political dead of Richard Nixon, who was elected President of the United States that fall. And while the country was writhing under constant turmoil, I was suffering from an identity crisis of my own, thanks to Jarvis Reed III. Our one-night stand in his dorm room my freshman year had a profound effect on me, provoking agonizing questions about my sexual orientation. I spent endless hours roaming through the C Floor stacks at Firestone Library, devouring everything I could find on the arcane subject of "transvestism".

And I threw myself into my studies, although as my grades began to rise, my social life went into a tailspin. I enjoyed the camaraderie and keg nights at Colonial, but I gave up on trying to find a girlfriend. Jarvis had been right, there wasn't a woman worth dating within a hundred miles of campus - until 1969, when the Board of Trustees shocked the alumni by announcing that beginning the next year, coeds would be admitted to Princeton!

There was much rejoicing among the student body, of course, although it immediately became apparent that the Triangle Club would never be the same. The all-male kickline in drag remained a feature of the shows, but with women now playing leading roles, boys dressing up as girls went from an essential part of the production to comic relief, and I found myself losing interest. I never tried out for another role.

By senior year, I'd grown my hair down to my shoulders -- thereby alienating my Midwest family, who practically disowned me -- and lived alone in a single room similar to the Jarvis's old lair. It was there that I finally gave in to my secret fantasy, and began to dress up as a girl in my private moments.

With my long hair, in a miniskirt and tights that I'd stolen from the Triangle Club dressing room, I was very passable as a pretty coed, and I even ventured out onto Nassau Street a few times, but I was always scared to death that I'd be discovered by someone I knew, so my excursions were few and far between. I knew I was becoming addicted to the soft feeling of those wonderful clothes, and to the smiles I'd get from passersby who took me for a pretty girl. Yet I desperately yearned to be normal, and when spring finally came, I tossed my stash women's clothing, got a haircut, made peace with my parents, and tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

* * *

Andrea sat up straight when a young, impeccably dressed black man entered her hospital room. "Who are you?" she asked nervously.

"My name is Dexter Boyd." He produced a business card which read "Dexter Boyd, Esq. Attorney at Law."

"Who sent you?"

"Nobody sent me. I keep my ear to the ground at police headquarters, and a few hours ago I was tipped off to the most amazing story. It seems a wanted Watergate fugitive was run over by a CPD patrol car. To make the case even more bizarre, according to the police report filed by the officer who was driving the car, the person she hit was a man dressed as a woman.

"Once I found out your name -- your real name -- I reviewed the old charges against you, and I had a little chat with the FBI. They believe that you are in possession of information which may be of great interest to the federal government."

"You talked to the FBI about me?"

"When I move, I move fast. In return for your cooperation, they would be willing to formally drop all pending charges, and apply for a grant of immunity from prosecution. I strongly recommend that you cooperate with them."

Andrea's head was spinning. "What about the Chicago police?"

Dexter Boyd flashed a wicked smile. "When we're through with them, you'll be on easy street for the rest of your life."

* * *

By the time I graduated, the war in Viet Nam was winding down, and a low draft number ensured that I wouldn't have to join the army. I had no desire to follow most of my classmates into law or med school, so on a lark, I applied for a summer internship in Washington. To my shock, I was offered a slot in the Nixon White House!

It didn't take me long to figure out how it happened: after graduating in 1968, Jarvis had gone to work for an advertising agency in New York, which happened to be where one of Nixon's top aides came from. Jarvis had volunteered to work as an advance man during the campaign, and to the victors belong the spoils -- he landed a job as an assistant to the Chief of Staff in the White House! By 1972, he was deeply entrenched as Bob Haldeman's right-hand-man, and when he spotted my application, he moved it to the top of the pile.

Needless to say, my parents were over the moon. They bought me a couple of conservative suits, I sublet a small apartment in Alexandria, and it was time for another culture shock. Talk about a well-oiled machine! Haldeman ran the White House like a Prussian general, and Jarvis was his number one flunkey. He took me under his wing once again, although I was always kept far removed from the Oval Office, and I was just getting a feel for the place when all hell broke loose.

It was June 20, 1972. Jarvis asked me to have lunch with him in the White House Mess. This was unheard of for a lowly intern, and at first, I suspected that he was going to try to seduce me again, but his motives were far more sinister. "The shit's hit the fan," he confided after we gave our orders to a navy steward. "And we've been given orders to clean it up."

"What are you talking about?"

"Some idiot from CREEP was caught red-handed in Larry O'Brien's office at the Watergate the other night, along with a bunch of Cuban goons."

"CREEP. You mean the Committee to Re-elect the President?"

"That's right. What a fucking screw-up."

"What were they doing there?"

"Looking for dirt on the Democrats, of course."

"Who would have ordered such a thing?"

"Who do you think? Fortunately, it's totally deniable, so long as we're able to get rid of any incriminating evidence before the FBI shows up."

"Incriminating evidence?"

"There's a safe full of it at CREEP, and it can never see the light of day. That's where you come in."

"Wouldn't that be...illegal?"

Jarvis rolled his eyes. "Christ, you're as naïve as you were back at Princeton. This is the real world, sweetheart! I can't get my fingerprints on any of this shit, but you're so far down the totem pole that nobody will even know you were there."

"What do you expect me to do?"

He handed me a key and a piece of paper with a series of numbers on it. "This is the key to the office of James McCord, the security director at CREEP. He's the moron who got caught red-handed at the Watergate with the Cubanos. That piece of paper has the combination to his safe. Your mission, should you decide to accept it (he was imitating the voice heard at the beginning of every episode of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE) is to enter McCord's office, clean out his safe, and throw the lot into the Potomac River."

"When am I supposed to do this?"

"Tonight."

* * *

Dexter Boyd was listening intently, taking an occasional note on a yellow pad. "Did Mr. Reed offer you anything in return for carrying out this...caper?"

"It was all bullshit. I'd be on the fast track for a permanent job on the White House staff, maybe he'd arrange for Haldeman to introduce me to the President, crap like that. He was so fucking clueless! I'd never been a big Nixon fan, but now that I was being asked to help cover up breaking and entering at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, I was sick to my stomach. And Jarvis couldn't even see it, his head was so far up his ass."

"So why didn't you tell him no?"

"I did, at first. Several times, in fact. But he kept after me, wouldn't let me get up from the table until he finally wore me down. Or so he thought. The more he pushed, the more pissed I was getting, until it dawned on me that once I got my hands on whatever was in that safe, I could do whatever I wanted with it."

"And what did you intend to do with the material?"

"Take it straight to the Democratic National Committee. I had a friend from Princeton who was working for McGovern, and I called him that afternoon -- didn't give him any details, just asked him if I could stop by and see him the next day. He knew I was working at the White House, which made me something of a pariah in his eyes, but he agreed to meet me for a drink at the rooftop lounge at the Washington Hotel at 6:00 pm the next evening."

* * *

Jarvis had to race off to a crisis meeting with Haldeman, and I escaped to my cubicle in the Old Executive Office Building. I borrowed someone's copy of the Washington Post, and got caught up on the Watergate investigation. It had been dismissed by the White House as a "third rate burglary", and I wondered what I'd find in McCord's safe?

A little after nightfall, I took a cab to CREEP's office on Connecticut Avenue and flashed my White House ID to the night receptionist. He paid no attention to me as I waited for the elevator, and I was shaking like a leaf as I rode it up to the top floor. But the hallway was deserted, and I had no trouble finding McCord's office and entering it with my key. The safe was right where Jarvis told me I'd find it, and once I opened it, I dumped the contents on McCord's desk and started to paw through the pile.

What I found was pure dynamite: a memorandum from someone named G. Gordon Liddy to John Mitchell, detailing the plans for the break-in....a hand-written note from Mitchell documenting that "RN has signed off" on the scheme...pages upon pages of reports on earlier break-ins, including one in Los Angeles targeting Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist...and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, evidently intended as payments to the burglars. Jarvis must not have known about the cash when he instructed me to deep-six the contents of McCord's safe!

I scooped everything into the empty briefcase I'd carried into the building, and tried to maintain my composure on my way out the door and back to my tiny apartment. Once the newspapers got ahold of the information in my briefcase, Richard Nixon's re-election would be blown out of the water! After a sleepless night, I decided that I'd better call my friend at the DNC and let him know what he was in for.

* * *

"That was your first mistake," Dexter Boyd observed.

"I guess Jarvis was right about me being naïve. It never occurred to me that CREEP had a wiretap on his phone."

"When you went to meet him, what happened?"

"I never got there. I was walking towards the hotel when this long black limousine pulled up beside me and some goon told me to get in. I panicked and hit him with the briefcase, and I was able to get away from them when I ducked into a drug store and slipped out the back door. I figured my apartment would be under surveillance, so I waited till dark, then walked to the Greyhound bus station, where I caught the first bus heading out of Washington. It happened to be heading to Chicago."

"And the briefcase?"

"What about the briefcase?"

"What happened to the documents? And the money?"

Andrea sighed. "I didn't have the guts to resurface. When I got to Chicago, I nearly died when I saw the front-page story in the Tribune: 'Watergate Suspect Disappears', the headline read. My old friend Jarvis had concocted a story that a lowly intern was the mastermind behind the whole Watergate break-in! I was a wanted man, and after my attempted kidnapping, I had no illusions about what those people were capable of."

"So, you disappeared."

* * *

I checked into a flophouse on State Street and tried to come up with a plan. My photo was on the front page of every newspaper in the country, so my first move was to buy a Cubs hat and a pair of sunglasses. I chanced a call to my parents from a pay phone, but they were so mortified that their son was a wanted criminal that I couldn't get a word in edgewise, so I hung up and wrote them off. With the White House PR machine going full bore against me, I knew that I'd never be able to convince my friends and family that I was really innocent.

Taking stock of my situation, it wasn't all bad: I'd given Jarvis the slip, and I had a fortune in untraceable cash at my disposal. What I needed was a disguise, so I could start a new life. I'm not sure when the idea struck me, but once it did, I felt an excitement that I hadn't experienced since those lonely, confused days at Princeton. Why couldn't I disguise myself as a girl?

I knew that I could be passable as a woman if I put together the right clothes and makeup and created a look. Shopping for women's clothes would be embarrassing, and potentially dangerous if I were spotted by someone who'd seen my picture in the paper, but that was a chance I had to take. I decided to blitz the largest department store in Chicago, Marshall Fields, on Friday late afternoon, when they'd be crowded with customers. The harried salesladies paid little mind to me when I paid for a teddy, a woman's tee shirt, Capri pants, some fashion jewelry and a purse. I'd decided that putting together something casual would be an essential first step -- once I was dressed as a girl, I'd be able to fill out my wardrobe without attracting undue attention. Shoes were more of a challenge -- I really should have tried them on, but I remembered my woman's size and asked the clerk for an inexpensive pair of flats as a "gift" for a lady friend. Then it was off to a wig shop, where I grabbed the first one on the shelf that looked halfway decent and paid for it without saying a word to the Chinese woman behind the counter. All that was left was makeup, and after I filled a basket at a nearby drugstore with one of everything, I explained to the curious cashier that the airline had lost my wife's suitcase, and she rang them up.

Then it was back to my crappy hotel room, where I shaved off every trace of body hair, applied my makeup, put on my wig, and dressed myself as a woman for the first time in months.

At the time, I had no idea that I would be dressing as a woman for the rest of my life, never to be seen as a man again....

* * *

"Did you have any contact with Jarvis Reed after that?"

"Are you kidding? For all I knew, he'd put out a contract on me. The contents of McCord's safe could send everyone in the White House to jail, and they went into total coverup mode. For a while, it looked like they'd pulled it off, and Nixon was re-elected by a landslide. It was McCord, of all people, who finally blew the whistle on them, and once the coverup started to unravel, I watched the whole thing on television like everybody else."

"From Chicago?"

"Yes, I never left."

"How did you establish yourself, create an identity and such?"

"Among the treasures in McCord's safe was a stock of blank driver's licenses and Social Security cards. They really were running a criminal enterprise at CREEP! In those pre-computer days, the information was typed in, so my first acquisition after I turned myself into a girl was a cheap portable typewriter. After I created identification for Andrea Dowd, I opened a bank account in her name with the loot I'd stolen from CREEP. Then I checked out of my hotel and rented an apartment in a new high rise on Erie Street."

* * *

Once I was satisfied that I was completely passable as a pretty girl, I decided to live my life one day at a time. Each day of freedom was a gift, I decided, and I intended to enjoy every moment to the full. That first summer, I took my time furnishing my apartment -- it was nothing more than a large studio, but with a spectacular view of Lake Michigan that made it seem much larger -- and putting together a wardrobe of cute, stylish clothes. My apartment was close to Oak Street Beach -- who knew Chicago was a beach town in the summer? I bought a woman's swimsuit and coverup, and every sunny day I'd carry a beach chair and towel to the lakeshore and bask for hours on the warm sand.

And on rainy days, I'd troll the shops on Michigan Avenue, until my closet and dresser drawers were starting to fill up with skirts, tops, dresses, shoes, and lingerie. In those days, city women wore stockings year round, but I didn't mind -- even on a hot Chicago day, I'd delight in feeling them against my legs as I strolled through the shops and treated myself to lady's lunches.

Then summer turned to autumn, and I had to find more room in my closet for sweaters and slacks as the weather started to chill. I was actually glad, since wearing a wig in the Chicago heat and humidity could be quite uncomfortable, but I told myself this was a small price to pay for my freedom. I loved taking long walks around Grant Park, visiting the museums and watching the busy world go by.

It was a momentous day when my hair finally grew long enough to style, and although it took me a long time to settle on the right hairdo for me, it was a relief just knowing that I wouldn't have to worry about my wig blowing off on a windy day! Once again I prowled the shops for winter skirts, boots and sweaters, until my little closet was overflowing.

But I didn't mind the Chicago winters at all, in fact I found it strangely liberating to trudge through the snow as I did my marketing for the comfort food that I prepared for myself every night. My life was falling into a blissful rut, and I'm sure that the indescribable pleasure that I derived from wearing women's clothing was a big part of it.

By the end of that first winter, I was beginning to think of myself as a woman, and I decided it was time for me to look for a job -- the money I'd stolen from CREEP wouldn't last forever. But around that time, the Watergate scandal was starting to unfold -- there were hearings every day on TV from Washington, and I couldn't tear myself away from them! I'd sit there in my apartment every day, watching Nixon's men perjure themselves, and the day Jarvis testified I couldn't take my eyes off the set -- he looked like he'd aged 100 years!

* * *

"That had to give you some satisfaction," Dexter Boyd observed drily.

"I'll say. Almost as much as when I learned that he'd been convicted of obstruction of justice and sentenced to 18 months in the slammer."

"Fortunately, thanks to Nixon's insane taping system, the Feds were able to get to the bottom of it all, and justice was served. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions -- for example, you broke into McCord's safe on the same date as the infamous 18 ½ minute gap conversation between Nixon and Haldeman, and the FBI wants to know if anything taken from that safe might shed some light on it."

"And they're willing to give me a pass if I let them see the documents?"

"If you let them have the documents. That's government property."

"And how about the money I stole?"

"So far as I know, the FBI is totally unaware of that. Nobody every reported that money stolen. But regardless, the statute of limitations on that ran out years ago. You're totally in the clear."

* * *

Fifteen years is a long time! After the Watergate saga wound down and Nixon finally resigned, I found a job at a travel agency on Michigan Avenue, and fantasized about the far-away places that I sent my clients to. It was a lonely little life that I'd consigned myself to, totally cut off from my family and working at a menial job, but I'd come to love living in Chicago as a woman, and I decided to live out my days in quiet contentment. I never gave any thought to taking hormones or having an operation -- I wasn't sure that my phony ID's would stand up to serious scrutiny -- so I kept a low profile, and put all thoughts of Princeton, Watergate -- and a career -- far out of my mind.