Title: Cornered: Dr. Richard J. Sharpe As I Knew
Him
Genre: Memoir
Author: Linda
DeFruscio
Website: www.thecorneredbook.com
Publisher: Twilight
Times Books
Purchase on Amazon
In the year 2000, Linda DeFruscio was forced to make
an unthinkable decision. Someone whose genius she admired immensely, a
business associate and dear friend, committed a terrible crime. In response, she
could cut off their friendship and avoid the risk of losing friends, clients
and her own peace of mind—or, she could trust her gut and try to save some
aspect of her friend's humanity.
Cornered is Linda DeFruscio’s story
of her long and often complex association with Dr. Richard J. Sharpe, the
millionaire dermatologist from Gloucester, MA who was convicted of killing his
wife. Beautifully written and surprisingly tender, Cornered allows the reader an upfront view of the fragility of
genius and the decline into madness, all while casting a second light on how
one woman’s refusal to turn her back resulted in momentous changes in her own
life.
CORNERED
Dr. Richard J. Sharpe, As
I Knew Him
by
Linda DeFruscio
Chapter
One – Hair, Pseudonyms And Transgender Lives
My mother was an electrologist too. Before
she got into the field, she worked in a factory, welding small parts for
airplanes. She was good at working with small things; she was good with her
hands. She liked electrolysis even more than airplane parts because along with
the intricate hand work and exacting eye focus came people, different people
with different personalities. When I got out of high school in 1972, she took
me into her office (which was in our home) and did my eyebrows. She explained
the process to me as she worked. I went into a dental studies program that same
year, offered by Northeastern and Tufts, and after a year and a half I received
a Dental Assistant certification. Thereafter I was accepted into a dental
hygiene program, but at a school in Connecticut. (The ones in Massachusetts
could only put me on a waiting list.) Instead of leaving my family to live out
of state, I decided to follow in my mother’s footsteps and go to school for
electrology, and cosmetology too. While I was a student, I worked as a dental
assistant (as well as a McDonald’s counter person and a housecleaner) to pay my
bills. I graduated from Eleanor Roberts School of Electrology in Boston in
1975.
In school, people came in off the street to
get inexpensive treatments from the students. One day Bart Fish came in, our
neighbor from near our home, and I worked on him. He told me that sometimes my
mother worked on him too. Small world. I didn’t know. Bart was married and had
three kids, one still at home. He confided that he was a cross-dresser, which
was why he didn’t want facial hair (and probably why I hadn’t known my mother
was working on him). By the time he came to me, I was a licensed master barber
as well as an electrologist. I worked on Bart’s beard and also cut his hair and
shaved him. I even practiced a few perms on him. On one occasion, his daughter
freaked out. She said I’d sent him home looking like a poodle. She didn’t mind
the cross-dressing, because he did that elsewhere, in a different state; it was
a separate segment of his life. But she couldn’t endure seeing him every night
at the dinner table looking like a priss. She made such a fuss that I went over
one evening and cut off his curls.
My mother, I would come to realize, knew
lots of cross-dressers, because they made up a good percentage of her
clientele. But she had never talked to me about them. It was Bart who helped me
to understand that some people just weren’t totally comfortable with the gender
they’d been born with; or they weren’t comfortable all the time. He was lucky,
he said. His wife accepted him as he was. He was her best friend and she didn’t
want to lose him just because he felt the need to alter his gender presentation
now and then. Bart’s job as a bra and underwear salesman provided him with the
opportunity to travel to different cities, destinations where he could
cross-dress without worrying about who found out. He had a friend in Manhattan,
and she was okay with his cross-dressing too. He said to me once, “Cross-dressers
will be some of your best clients. Don’t be afraid of them. There’s nothing to
be afraid of. We’re all just people.”
Once the cat was out of the bag, my mother
and I began to spend social time with Bart and his wife, chatting over lemonade
on their porch or in our house. One day Bart offered to take me to an
IFGE—International Foundation for Gender Education—meeting so I could learn a
little more. His friend Merissa Lynn had founded the organization, in Waltham,
Massachusetts. She wanted to help me to find clients. I told her I liked to
write and she suggested I write an article about electrolysis for the IFGE
magazine. She and Bart introduced me to other people.
Over time, Bart became my mentor and
confidante. When Mom retired, he encouraged me to start my own business. Even
though I was still very young, Bart and his wife were certain I would achieve
success. I would inherit mom’s clients, and there would be some IFGE people
too. To me, the transgender people were just regular people (perhaps a little
more empathetic and more educated than other people I knew) who were conflicted
about their gender identification. They lived, they died, and in between they
worried about high blood pressure and paying their taxes like anyone else. My
acceptance of them was automatic; after my conversations with Bart, I never
gave it a second thought. As for Bart, he was a second father to me, my own
father being away much of the time.
So I did it. I started my own business. At
first I worked in the house, in the room that had been my mother’s office.
Then, with Bart’s encouragement, I opened my office in Newton, and before I
knew it I had a thriving practice. I liked being an electrologist. I liked the
process. Each hair I removed gave me a surprise. One might have a big juicy
black bulb at the end, and one might not. Analyzing each hair provided a clue
as to what was going on under the skin. Also, I liked the people. They weren’t
all transgender people either; a lot of my clients were straight men with
ingrown hairs or just too much hair, or straight women who needed work on their
upper lips, chins, legs, or underarms. Some wanted eyebrow shaping. Sometimes
pregnancy produces unwanted hairs in unexpected places. Electrolysis is a safe
way to deal with it. Menopause can create hair havoc too. All kinds of people
seek to control their hair growth.
Being an electrologist is not so different
from being a psychiatrist…or a bartender. If a client comes in for hundreds of hours,
and you are working together in a small quiet room, eventually they will open
up and tell you about their life. I’ve had many a patient cry and admit they
need to work on a particular issue. I always respond, “I’m not a therapist. I’m
not allowed to tell you what to do. But I can give you my opinion.” That always
turns out to be what they wanted anyway, more or less.
I’ve done my share of venting too. Once, on
the way into work, a crazy driver came within an inch of taking me out on the
highway. I was really shaken up. I remember how happy I was when I got to the
office and realized that my first patient was someone who would want to know
every detail of the almost accident. The transgender clients were always the
most interesting to tell your troubles to, because they are really part female
and part male. If you tell them a relationship problem, for instance, they will
be able to help you to look at it from both perspectives. Talking to
transgender clients is as comfortable—and as comforting—as talking to my mom or
best girlfriends. In fact, I count a few transgender women among my best
girlfriends.
Besides my work, I continued to write skin
care articles for Merissa. One day I was even contacted by the famous—well,
famous to those of us who work in skin care—Dr. Peter Chives, who asked me to
write an article for the Annals of
Dermatology, for which he served as editor-in-chief. Dr. Chives was the
author of more than a dozen books, one of which was in its sixth edition and
had been translated into several foreign languages. He was also the author of
over three-hundred scientific publications. I was thrilled when he contacted me
and said he considered me to be outstanding in my field and wanted me to review
a textbook that had been written by one of his colleagues. I accepted of
course. But while I had written lots of magazine articles, I’d never written a
book review on a technical book, and I had no idea how to go about it. As it
happened, one of my patients, a professional writer, volunteered to give me
some tips. I submitted the final piece on time and the issue appeared at the
end of 1991.
* * *
When Chris Trembly first called me I was
between patients and had the time to talk, which was good, because Mr. Trembly
had some nice things to say. He’d read the article that I’d written for Annals of Dermatology. He liked it a
lot; he thought I was a good writer. This was about the best compliment anyone
could pay me. Chris Trembly said he liked to write too, but he didn’t say what
he wrote and I didn’t ask. He’d called because he had ingrown hairs on his neck
and he thought I would be the right person to remove them. We set up an
appointment.
He came in a week later. He was a sweet,
shy, soft-spoken, unassuming man. Dark eyes, longish dark hair. A combination
of a young Mick Jagger and Keanu Reeves. Maybe 5’9, about 165 pounds. Mid to
late thirties, which is to say about my age. He wore black pants and a white
shirt and dark cranberry penny loafers with shiny pennies in the vamp inserts.
I led him into the treatment room. I have a chart on the wall there featuring
several graphics that define the electrolysis process. The first thing I do
with a new patient is tell him or her how electrolysis works—a very fine probe
inserted into a hair follicle on the surface of the skin, etc. I always enjoy
this explanation. I use the chart as a prop.
Before I could get started, Chris Trembly
told me, politely, that he didn’t have time for the first-visit consultation
that day. If I could just work on a few of his ingrowns…. He promised the next
visit he would relish the opportunity to talk about the process. In spite of
the fact that he was in a hurry, he was pleasant. When our eyes met, he looked
right into mine. I had him get up on the table and I examined his ingrowns
under the light and removed a few. We set up another appointment.
An ingrown hair can occur when a hair is
shaved and it retreats below the skin surface, causing inflammation and
irritation. There are ways to reduce the number of ingrown hairs, such as
running one’s razor under hot water for about thirty seconds. Shaving in one
direction (the direction of the hair), and never using a blade more than three
times, is also good. If you cheat, your
skin will know. I was telling all this to Chris Trembly during our third
session, because during the second session, as was the case with the first, he
had to be somewhere and didn’t have time for more than the removal of a few
more ingrowns. I was happy to finally have the chance to impart my knowledge to
him, to point to the illustrations on my trusty wall chart. He followed the
movement of my finger diligently. Alternately, he looked into my eyes. His
apparent interest in what I was saying stirred me to say more, to add more
detail than usual. When I stopped to take a breath, he smiled a hesitant smile
and said, “My name isn’t really Chris Trembly.”
I was taken aback not at all. There are
those among my clients who prefer that I don’t know their real names. Like
Fred, for instance. In ten years I’ve never asked him for his real name and I
never plan to. Fred adores his wife and his five kids. He has a nice home. He
likes his life. When he first came to me, he said, “I don’t want to change my
life but I do want to be more of the real me. I want my hair thinned on my
beard, knuckles and brows.”
Over time Fred told me his story. He
cross-dressed once a month, always in the daytime when he could fit his
excursions into his work day. Generally he went to out-of-town malls or to
hotels to have lunch alone or with transgender friends. Unlike my dear friend
Bart, his wife knew nothing about it, and he had no intention of letting her
find out—because he suspected she wouldn’t approve. He knew he was right when
she told him over dinner one night about the disgusting transsexuals she’d seen
on some TV talk show. The last thing Fred wanted was for her to think of him
that way and leave him. The second to last thing he wanted was to have to give
up the one afternoon a month that he dressed as a woman. He came to me to find
a compromise.
Money was no object for him, so we agreed
that we would do very short sessions, removing only a few hairs at a time,
several times a month. I said, “At this rate you’ll be with me for a long time.”
“That’s fine,” he responded.
During each session I removed two or three
hairs from under his nose, a few from his chin, his brows, his knuckles—so
little that if anyone noticed at all, they would think he had scratched
himself. While I worked, he liked to talk about politics. He had a government job,
he said. During one appointment he told me a story about how he’d lost his
purse while he was out. I said, “Oh my God, was your government ID in it?” No,
he’d created a different ID for his excursions, for his alternate self; he even
had a PO box just for his transgender mail. His interest in politics and his
guile led me to suspect that he worked for an intelligence agency. But I never
asked.
After eight or so years of ongoing
appointments, we got to where he wanted to be; he was no longer “hairy.” But he
didn’t look as though he’d had any hair removed either. We knew we had created
a masterpiece when his wife said to him one day, “You know, now that you’re
getting older, your hair is thinning on your face. It looks great! You’re more
handsome than ever.”
I saw him once with his wife, at my
favorite luncheonette. He’d asked me years before never to say hello to him if
I saw him outside of my office, and I’d never forgotten. So I turned away while
I waited for my to-go order. I was about to pass their table on my way out the
door when he said, “Nice day, huh?” I glanced at him. He was smiling. I glanced
at her. She looked at me suspiciously. I said, “Yeah, it’s beautiful,” and
hurried outside.
* * *
I smiled at Chris Trembly when he said he
wasn’t Chris Trembly, and I went on talking about ingrown hairs. I was
explaining that you could use a tablespoon of salt and warm water, mixed
together on a piece of gauze, or even in your hand, as an exfoliant to heal any
irritation…just like how ocean water works to heal the skin. But a few minutes
later he interrupted my lecture again to say, “Did you know that an
ophthalmologist from St. Louis, Missouri was the first person to use
electrolysis on someone who had ingrown eyelashes in the year 1875?”
That stopped me cold. I stared at him. He
smiled his sheepish smile. Then he pulled his wallet from his pocket and
extracted two loose photos and handed them to me. The first was a picture of
him wearing a lab coat over a dress shirt and tie, a stethoscope draped around
his neck. The second appeared to be a photo of a woman, but I recognized
instantly that it was him, in drag. I handed them back. “Are you a doctor?” I
asked.
He nodded. I looked him over. As always, he
was wearing a fresh white shirt and penny loafers, his signature ensemble. He
said, “I’m a dermatologist. My name is Richard Sharpe.”
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