Country Lee Simms and his rooms

   "You tell that little faggot to turn in his keys, he ain't livin' up here no more!"
The boss was mad. Country Lee Simms was a barrel-chested southern biker, but when he got pissed-off his voice went up high like a girl's.
   All he had accomplished by this screaming was to alert an entire normal office building to the fact that someone had been living in his bad-smelling rented office space. Lee went through offices pretty fast. There was so much chaos and drug and alcohol use associated with his operations that he often got kicked out. Eventually the parent company BayGent rented a house for him so he wouldn't disturb any neighbors. I worked for this guy on and off over a period of 7 years, mostly raising funds for veteran's groups.
   The "little faggot" in question was Lee's secretary for the office; a slightly older than middle-aged drag queen named Jess. Jess was OK, pretty much an elfin, harmless kook. Originally from rural Idaho, he favored odd women's wigs along the stylistic line of JoAnne Whorley's hair on Laugh-In circa 1968. In addition to aiding in the pursuit of a female persona, the wigs also served the purpose of concealing a congenital bone-crest atop his head. He had been living in this particular office off 11th and Madison and did keep a pretty low profile; but his pile of dirty clothes and other personal crap had grown to the point where Lee had finally taken exception. Jess was to die suddenly of a heart attack outside a different one of Lee's offices a few years after this particular incident.
   Jess wasn't in the office, so bearing the brunt of Lee's rage was Lee's appointed office manager; an old, dilapidated, stinky crack-cocaine addict who strongly resembled one of those grizzled pervert pirates drawn by S. Clay Wilson in the old ZAP comix. Name of Dennis, this character had a habit of collecting bizarre criminal types that would hang out in the office at all hours. At one point, a couple of Dennis' paranoid drug-addict friends had accosted some normal citizen in the Madison office because they assumed he was there to sell them drugs, then they got angry because he wouldn't! Some of these types had just gotten out of prison and would work there briefly to establish some phony reference for their parole officer or whatever. Dennis was also a pathological liar and entirely untrustworthy. Within a few years he had absorbed most of the paid accounts worth calling, and left everyone else scrabbling. Lee knew Dennis was a crappy guy, but just wanted someone to do the work. Eventually, BayGent set Dennis up with a room of his own on a temporary deal down in Arizona. He stole the money, the furniture, the office equipment and everything else and was never heard from again. Last spotted in Chicago.