This is a true story.
It comes from the back of the house. It sounds like an old-fashioned telephone ringer. It rings short, then pauses, then longer, then pauses, then FOR-EV-ER. When it works, that is. It’s the broken doorbell in my apartment. I call it “the Nikki bell”.
I used to live two doors down the street from the building I’m in now, and I’ve been in the neighborhood quite a while – I know the neighbors. The previous tenants in my apartment were a woman and her – first two, then only one – sons. Ko, who left about a year ago, was kind of a buddy of mine. We chatted on the street, I’d see him around town and we’d talk. Nice guy, very flaming, total darling. I didn’t know the mom and I didn’t know Dante. I knew of them, but I didn’t know them.
The first time I *saw* Dante was shortly after his cosmetic surgery. I was sitting on my front stoop with a group of friends when this pair of tits walked past. I know that’s a horrible thing to say, but they were so big and so revealed that there was no person, just tits. I’m a straight woman, but I stopped mid sentence, my jaw dropped and I, like the guys sitting with me, just watched those tits walk past. I didn’t realize until later that that was Dante.
In fact, it was about several months later that the neighbors started whispering about the drag queens up the street. It wasn’t that people had a problem with the lifestyle, but the “girls” would sit outside and get progressively louder in the wee hours. Also, people would shout from the sidewalk to the third-floor apartment for various “girls” to either come out or to let them in. This was the point at which I started hearing about “Nikki”, but I hadn’t yet made the connection that she used to be/still was/would again become Dante, since I didn’t actually know either of them.
About 2-3 months before I moved in, my old neighbor Jovan was walking home one day when he saw Nikki standing in the vestibule of her building… well, that’s not quite true. Some dude was standing there, Nikki was kneeling in front of him, and I’m sure you can guess what (s)he was doing down there. The next time Nikki saw Jovan, she propositioned him with several of her drag-queen friends and even went so far as to start to follow him home. Jovan recruited several of the neighbors to talk to our landlord.
Problem was, the lease wasn’t in Nikki’s name and the landlord couldn’t really tell mom that she couldn’t let her son live with her, but “If Nikki keeps trickin’ himself all over the neighborhood, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
Well, eventually it came out that Nikki’s mom had moved out without telling the landlords. She hadn’t actually transferred the lease and Nikki owed a good amount of back rent, so out she went.
And in I moved, to my dream apartment.
She strikes me as someone I could hang out with. I like being a voyeur into her thoughts.
As for the other 5, they can remain in obscurity.