My Bio - Part 16

Stephan (Steve) was my most memorable neighbor of all in a good way. A 34-year-old Black man, he worked as an engineer at a nearby Air Force base. I would have married him, to his delight, if I had been as attracted to his appearance as I was to who he was on the inside.

Steve and I spent countless hours hanging out, usually at his place across the hall. We talked about all kinds of things. He moved out a year after I did, and over the years, I’ve made numerous attempts to locate him, but without success.

There’s not much to say about Mark and Bruce. Both were in their twenties, and I had one-nighters with them, though I didn’t do much with Mark.

Mark lived on the first floor of the building, while I met Bruce on the bus. He had a guitar with him that day, and when I told him I played too, we bonded over our shared love of music. We got together a few times to jam.

Bruce wasn’t in my life for long. He reminded me too much of Al—conceited and always putting me down. He even said he’d be scared if he ever felt attracted to the same sex.

“People with your kind of attitude are what scare me, Bruce. Not who I am,” I told him.

Then there was 40-year-old Tracy. Andy and I met her through Fran. Apparently, Fran had taken her in off the streets, though Tracy later moved in with someone else. Tracy was unattractive and butch-looking in every sense. So unattractive that you almost felt sorry for her.

While Tracy could be funny and had a great voice for our “funny” recordings (she loved being taped and edited), she was also a major con artist. She would use you if you weren’t careful, but my old neighbors from Oswego Street had taught me well. I never left her alone in my apartment, and I always hid my purse when she visited so she couldn’t swipe anything while I was in the bathroom. Tracy didn’t visit much, and that was fine with me—I didn’t like having people over that I couldn’t trust.

During the summer of 1990, I worked at the end of my street at a combination Laundromat and convenience store for a few months. One day, a young woman came in pushing a one-year-old boy in a stroller. She had tan skin, dark, thick, waist-length hair, dark brown eyes, and sparkling white teeth. She was muscular yet feminine. I recognized her right away as the girl who had bullied everyone at the Harley Hotel…Paula. For some reason, she had spared me, but I had always been wary of her.

She won’t remember me, I thought.

But I was wrong.

“Hi, Jodi,” she said with a friendly, white smile. “I remember you from the Harley. I was looking for you at the Red Roof Inn after I left.”

I froze and blinked with shock. “Looking for me?”

Paula nodded. “I heard you worked there.”

I never worked there but was amazed she remembered me and curious why she’d been looking for me. We were never friends.

But that all changed on that humid summer day. Paula and her young son lived just a couple of buildings away, also on the fourth floor, as I would learn. She didn’t have a phone, but we visited each other regularly. I usually went to her place more often because it was easier for her with little Robert to take care of.

I couldn’t believe we had become friends. I never would’ve guessed I’d be friends with someone like Paula, who had mellowed out quite a bit, though she still had an underlying aggressive streak just like I did. We were both on disability and both had ADHD, though hers seemed much worse. She was very accepting of my preference for women, and she had a fondness for Puerto Rican men.

Paula seemed to be just as unlucky as I was—cursed in love, constantly dealing with one problem or dispute after another, always scraping pennies. She wasn’t very bright and she was quite flaky. She was like Fran in the sense that she believed cat burglars stole cats and that the Boston Tea Party was a gathering where people drank tea.

She was miserable sitting at home all day with a child and often told me she regretted becoming a mother. Two years later, she lost Robert for good. They said she was abusive and neglectful. For reasons I could never understand, she later had another son, Justin, and almost lost him too, but somehow she managed to keep him.

Two days after Christmas in 1989, I met twenty-nine-year-old Kathleen at one of the gay bars Andy and I frequented. Her nickname was Kacey. She wasn’t as feminine as I was, but she wasn’t butchy either. She had long, straight, dark blonde hair that reached just below her waist and hazel eyes. She was pretty, though I usually preferred dark hair and eyes. Kacey was 5‘4” and weighed 115 pounds. She lived on one side of a duplex with her small dog and bird. She worked rotating shifts as a chemical operator at a nearby chemical plant.

Kacey and I didn’t have issues when it came to sex, but it seemed she wanted it all the time, and sex was more important to her than the relationship itself. She wasn’t as into being with me (non-intimately) as I was with her, so she broke things off after a couple of months. This was the hardest break-up for me, too.

With thirty-one-year-old Brenda, it was the opposite. She was more into me than I was into her. The sex was just as frequent, though maybe it felt excessive to me because I wasn’t as attracted to her.

Brenda was part Cherokee with distinct features. She was 5‘6”, had dark hair and eyes, and her hair fell almost to the middle of her back. She was too thin from doing crack, something she didn’t tell me at first and I was too naïve to notice. Her drug use, combined with the fact that I didn’t feel she was right for me, led me to end things after ten months, right before she moved away. Brenda wasn’t dumb, but she came across as shy, quiet, and wimpy—not the kind of person who would make me feel safe. And for someone as small as I am, feeling safe with my partner was important to me.

When Brenda and I met, she was living next door with an eighteen-year-old guy. She was bi, not just gay. We crossed paths in the hallway one day in June 1990, and I knew she was attracted to me from the way she stared me down. Soon after, we ran into each other again in the laundry room and things progressed from there. She told me the guy moved out, and her longtime friend Bonnie had moved in.

I hated Bonnie. She was ugly, aggressive, into drugs, and a terrible influence on Brenda. We almost got into a fight once. I can’t remember why, but I called her a bitch as Brenda and I were heading out one day. On the way back, Bonnie lunged at me, but Brenda and Bonnie’s boyfriend stepped between us before I could react.

Brenda had been in an abusive marriage with the father of her two kids. The children lived with her sister and brother-in-law, which indicated to me that her instability and drug problem went back further than she was willing to admit. I had never been with a crackhead before, so I had a lot to learn.

Although Brenda was on disability, she worked under the table as a taxi driver.

A few months after we met, Brenda surprised me with an orange and white tabby kitten. I named him Shadow because he followed me everywhere. Shadow was a loving, friendly little guy, but he could also be quite destructive. He grew into one of the biggest cats I had ever seen, too.

Just before meeting Kacey in October 1989, I finally managed to wean myself off of Navane. The tardive dyskinesia had gotten out of hand—my facial and neck muscles twitched constantly, and I occasionally had spasms in my shoulders. It took four months of trying before I was able to successfully pull myself off the medication, but even today, the twitching remains, though it seldom occurs.

Around the same time, I discovered that I could draw. It was the strangest thing. I had a “feeling” I could draw, and it had been nagging at me for some time. So one day, I took a picture of Gloria Estefan and drew it. It wasn’t great, but it was better than what most people could do, and drawing became a hobby for a while.