Campfyre Stories

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.

The first night I slept there, I woke up at about 2:30am to someone POUNDING on my door.  I couldn’t understand how they got upstairs, let alone why they were so insistent about getting me up so early in the morning.  I answer the door to someone looking for Nikki.

“Where’s Nikki?”

“Uh…  what?  Who?”

“Dark skinned girl, real thin?”

“Sorry, man, I just moved in here, she must’ve moved out.”

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry I woke you.”

Ok, so that was alright except that he DEMANDED I let him in at 2:30 in the morning. 

A couple weeks later, I get another one at the door.

“Where’s Nikki?”

“She moved.”

“No she didn’t.”

*shocked* “Uh…  yeah, she did.  I’ve been living here since July.”

“You lyin’.  I seen her since July and she didn’t say nothin’ about no movin’.”

“Well, I’m not lying, Nikki doesn’t live here.  You can see that I’m not her and I’m not her mom.  You can see I have different furniture.  Nikki moved.”

“Where she go?”

“Don’t know.  Good night.”  *close door*

At this point I went to the landlord and complained about the downstairs door being left unlocked in the middle of the night.  That pretty much stopped.  Now, at least, I didn’t have people showing up banging on my door looking for Nikki.

Problem is, they still keep looking for her. 

The weird thing is that there were 2 doorbells for this apartment when I moved in.  One was electronic - but the actual bell part, they took it with them when they moved (???).  Don’t ask me.  The other one was one of those old bells with a hammer that goes when the bell is rung, but that one didn’t work.  My landlord hooked me up with a new electric doorbell, but the button itself, downstairs, had to be moved to an out-of-the-way location just to make it work.

But every now and again that old-fashioned bell goes off, rather incessantly for a while.  I’ve stopped answering it, though, because every time it rings, it’s someone looking for Nikki.  Someone who wants to argue with me that (s)he didn’t actually move and still lives here, that I’m somehow lying to them.

One of these days, when they ask for Nikki, I’m going to say “You mean Dante?”  Partly to see the look on their faces, partly because, from what I’ve heard, Nikki doesn’t exist anymore, but Dante still does.

I wonder if he kept the tits.

~FG };^>