"RUBYS DEAD!"...

"Rubys dead" (whispered with a slight echoe) then...  click !  I put the receiver down and rolled back onto my bed. That was the lightning quick, hang-up call that I received on my home rotary phone at 2:22am on February the 5th of 2015.  I stirred around in bed after that before pulling a mink coat over me to warm up as I sleep naked.  I could hear a fierce wind whipping the branches of the rowan tree in the back garden against my window.  I was in a heavy trance as I watched their shadows dance on the walls. It all lulled me back to sleep immediately.

I woke up the next day completely unaware of that call the from night before... but my phone was off the hook on the floor at the side of my bed and a busy signal was emitting from it...

It was several nights later that Ruby entered my mind, but why?  I had worked for her for three years in her outrageous cafe but that was a lifetime and a thousand miles ago.  I had not given her a thought for years.  I tried to sleep still experiencing flashbacks to Ruby and the old Cafe Carousel. I started to drift off staring at my old rotary telephone on the night table when I had a deja vu...  I heard a voice whisper in the dark, "Rubys dead".  It was the same voice from that windy night that I had forgotten and I remembered that "call" now in this moment for the first time, vividly.  I sat up grabbing my cell phone and googled Ruby's full name, the states that she had lived in and any other pertinent information as she had a very common real name.  I entered it all and did a search and there it was, her obituary and it was only online for all of two weeks.   It had all come full circle, the last of the original staff were gone now,  so I had no idea who called me with that announcement that "Rubys dead".   I did not sleep that night, I kept seeing Ruby sitting at the family table chain smoking Eve light 100's telling me the story of Geraldine, how she found her in the snow, took her in, the years in between and how she was taken out in the end... playing over and over like a dream sequence from a film all night in my mind.

This was the infamous, red, (now fittingly black) revolving back door to Rubys toadstool cafe several decades ago.  Ruby a feisty, big blond already well into her 40's had originally left the nutmeg state in search of a spicier one.  She would never discuss her past or youth in Connecticutt, it would forever remain a mystery. Her former life in her 20's and 30's seemed to be an empty black hole, as if it never happened. She fled the rural New England state amongst outrageous rumours though only to create even more outrageous rumours with her new life and an old coffee shop, which she took no time in taking over and turning into a real den of iniquity...   the notorious Cafe Carousel (with its own separate very busy and even more notorious basement, which opened everynight as soon as the cafe's last candle burned out.) 

  Ruby started as a waitress and in a New York minute became part owner then primary owner.  That was when the basement "business" really started booming.  The staff she chose (who she could mold and manipulate) was no less nefarious... there was Lurch, Fishhead, Carmine, the scandalous Miss Cookie and two die hard regulars...the pretentious, ancient, over plastic surgeried Touché (who was driven out of the same nutmeg state, dodging sticks and stones) and silent partner Bobby Z  aka the Staten Island Stalker.  The constantly morphing staff (many with no past and no ID) however revolved more than its illicit back door and this is how Miss Geraldine was able to arrive and thrive at the cafe carousel.

How Geraldine came to be:

It was just another status quo night at the cafe carousel as a grumpy Ruby proceeded to place the over used off-white candles in dirty, smudged glass holders on the tables in the very dark dining room.  The area was offset by a wall-long tarnished mirror which gave bizarre, distorted reflections. Everything was very old in the cafe... including most of the clientele.  The nightly scenario was set with a cast of out-cast characters each at seperate tables, all owning them like small islands or a throne and all oblivious to each other.  Each one had been given nick-names over the years.  Tonight Ruby would be bantering with and serving  "The Slug",  "Shrinking Violet",  "Cia-Pet Head" and "Toothless Tony" amongst many others.  It was snowing heavily out and Ruby was off kilter, as there were five or six "tea baggers" amongst the clientele (who would ask for ten or eleven refills of hot water for one tea bag).  She detested them, she'd grouse "Go fill their damn cups up with dirty dish water!" It also didnt help that her former head-cook, confidenté and dishwasher "Penguino" had stormed out (with the register contents, the coin bank and one of Rubys favorite boys) the night before.  They had been the best of frenemies like all of her former cronnies. She had just pulled an exhausting double as cook-waitress and was nodding off at times at the family table despite ten or eleven cups of very strong coffee. Ruby always needed to have a partner in crime with her at the carousel, with the same habits and patterns.  This often back fired on her though, many times over the years, including  the dramatic disaster from the night before. 

  Rubys luck however was about to change forever, for the better...  or was it ?  She glanced outside to see that there was a desperate soul just outside in the heavy, wet snow who had ripped open her cafe's large garbage bags in search of a meal.  The lady in question was just exiting a bag wide derriere first when Ruby tapped on the window, nodded to the hefty gal and motioned to her with a large topaz ringed forefinger to the notorious, infamous back door...

This ghost story preludes and continues with

"GERALDINES REVOLVING BACK DOOR" from August 6th of 2014 

Copyright @ March 2020

All Rights Resrved

Written by Fritz Von Ludwigslust

All photos by Fritz 

"THE GRAND DUCHESS OF EXCESS AND DEGREDATION"...

 Queen "V",  was a self-appointed queen without a throne... or the ability to get to one.  Self entitled, defiant, over the top, unapologetic, demanding, petty, shrewd and in phobic, perpetual denial.  She was very reminiscent of an older, frazzled version of character actress Lucille Benson.  She lead a spoiled, self-centered life, but after many years of ravenous excess and multiple, bizarre addictions it turned her into a home bound recluse living in filth and squalor.   (Pic above:  I explore the Grey-Gardens like ruin at the top of the tower where "V" once lived... and V surely was a "Big Edie" type, but without the trans-Atlantic accent or the charm).



Sometime in 2001...  On a visit to "The Duchess"...

"She wont eat out of a bowl". Miss V announced to me as she dumped a stinky and foul smelling can of wet, cat food on the already stained, smudged, wooden floor.   "Well...  if you leave it in a bowl long enough, she'll get hungry and eat it" I replied, still in disbelief.
  There were many other similar large, stained areas on the overly trodden, wooden floor of Miss V's macabre apartment.  It was a disastrous, hoarder's nest of hundreds of pairs of shoes, high heels and boots (many in wrapped boxes unopened, never worn), hundreds of designer bags, expensive perfumes, costly skin cremes and hosiery (also obviously never used or opened ) and an unending stream of mice that jumped out of everywhere and over piles of yellowing newspapers, plastic bags, rotten food, double-used adult pampers and dozens of glue traps laden with giant  bugs, roaches, house flies and even more mice some alive, some dead...  dead for so long in fact that only a trace of their fur was left on the gluies.


In retrospect today in Wheeling...

She disappeared one winter night... or morning (depending on who you asked) leaving everything behind amidst completely conflicting stories.  From eye-witness claims of her shouts of being robbed and screaming in the lobby spinning around in her chair like Crawford in "Baby Jane"...  to being found face down on her floor in a mess of canned cat food, mouse traps and candy wrappers...  after having "fallen" out of her chair (or "helped" out of it) Ala Olivia DeHavilland in "Caged".
 She was taken to a nearby hospital ... or was she?   No one in the building or on the street ever heard or saw an ambulance during the time of her disappearance...  Nor did anyone ever actually see her leave the building.   The only solid truth was that she was never to return,  (or leave?) to the giant mouse trap that she dwelled in or to ever be seen again.

     It still makes no sense at all today...  Miss Queen V's  disappearance that is...


 I sit here on a windy night in Wheeling pondering all of the conflicting stories, all of them bizarre and all them completely different accounts.  Anyone would doubt and question the shady cast that lived in her upscale building.  Could you blame them though?  This "Jabba the hut-Queen Bee" combo that never learned how to say please or thank you, and who's trademark phrase was grousing or croaking."I never ask anyone for anything", was very easy to dislike.  Were they all in on it together like the cast of an Agatha Christie mystery? Or was Miss V the royal toad of excess and degradation just hallucinating the events that lead to her mysterious "disappearance" (rumoured or factual).
 Someone, or everyone was lying...  but why?


The real story begins...  In flashbacks...


...  I knew something was wrong, very wrong before I even stepped into the lobby of her grey high rise tower.  It was 1:30am and we had not heard from the Duchess in over two days...  unheard of before as she was always constantly texting or calling people in a frenzy.
  I stood in the pristine, veil of heavy snowfall looking up at her 12th (top) floor lightless windows from the street where it was only 19°F and a fierce, wicked wind was trying to knock me down.  Yes, something was very wrong at the top of the tower.  I seized my opportunity running into the lobby's two locked doors behind a delivery boy wearing headphones under a hat and hood, blasting so loud that I could actually hear the lyrics of the song that he was in a deep, mindless trance over.  He did not even see me slip behind him as I shadowed him to the elevator.   My heart was beating quicker with every floor that we slowly rose above, when suddenly the door slid open with a gush of foul air that smelled of a dog kennel and the homeless.  The stench grew as I turned the corner of the high gloss, immaculate floors of her hallway.  I stood in front of her door hesitating...  The unknown taunting me.  I pushed the heavy door open with a shove as I knew that it was unlocked... she always left it unlocked.   It croaked open like a huge, hungry toad and with it emitted more clouds of foul, fetid air.  I stepped into the trashed laden foyer and stopped...   Dead silence, no parrots shouting out curse words with V's heavy New Yawk street accent, no television blasting full volume and no cockatoo screeching like a banshee.  I stepped slowly forward but my eyes could not focus in the very dim light.  I slowly turned the corner to enter her main room when six or more mice burst out of nowhere and scattered all over the odorous mess in front of me.  I noticed that a small, wall closet that appeared to have always been nailed shut before was now wide open and I could make out what appeared to be flickering lights in the tomb-like, still darkness. I froze for a minute, turned the corner into the room and then...


A Teaser-Trailer. Full Story soon...

Where the Queen (or Duchess), is exposed as not only a lady of black magic,  but also as a former, very busy "lady of the night"...

"MAXIME AND FRAU HÖLLE"


  Maxime or "Max" as I used to call her, was a flaxen haired, Blue-Ridge-Mountain eyed wild child, a rebel and a renegade, who became a wandering nomad suffering from a severe case of chionomania...  she was also an incredibly talented, intellectual, outsider artist who disappeared after a whirlwind global trek from the Piedmont just west of D.C. to the posh Park Avenue area of Manhattan to the Gothic walls of Berlin in Kraut-land and back to Gotham city, before vanishing forever after a curious stint as a tattooed laden manager of a smoke shop and adult "toy" store wedged between thickets of cabbage palms and slash pines on Alligator Alley in the Everglades.


(From a message I received on my answering machine on January the 6th of 1999)...

  "Frau Hölle!" that will be my next tattoo!"  "Today is her day, so this next tattoo must be of her... is it snowing up there yet?"  "She's the goddess of the Nordic fairy tales who brings snow".  "You know, the one that I used to talk about all the time...  Remember?"
    Next tattoo, I thought to myself ...  what tattoos?  The goddess of snow?  Maybe she was famous in Germany and Scandinavia, but I never heard of her in Manhattan before.  I sat dumbfounded,  as it had been a long time since I had heard from Max and this latest development was rather stupefying.  We had been so close for many years but I felt her drifting away (like Frau Hölle's snow?) since she had flown south to Florida to regroup and get herself back together.  Frau Hölle had certainly not made an appearance in the deep south of the sunshine state in many decades. So how did Max end up there in the sub tropics after all of her years chasing after and searching for the perfect snowstorm and Lady Hölle?  Maxime was so intense about this obsession that it was reminiscent of the little girl and her driven wanderings in the cult film "Spirit of the Beehive"
  We must go back to when we first met to tell the tale of "Maxime and the Goddess of Snow". Of course Maxime might not have been her real name and it will remain unknown for many reasons.  It's not important anyway... but her ghost story is.

Upper East Side. Manhattan.  Winter of 1992

   I first saw Maxime on a lush spring day of luminous wispy clouds overhead and lilacs blooming on the side streets of Manhattans upper east side.  She was sitting at a bar in a German cafe gazing dreamily at the stiff, meringue like head that sat on top of her tall glass of golden Hefe Weiss Bier,  like a snow cap on top of Old Smoky.  She touched the meringue cloud gently and said... "You know in Germany it's considered a necessary art... that is achieving the correct head on tapped beer".
 "It reminds me of snow,  I love snow,  there's something so pure, magical and otherworldly about it,  like it comes from a distant, winter world in the outer cosmos".  "I could never live anywhere where there was no snow,  never".  That was my introduction to "Max"...

  I took a cell pic of an old photo (above) that I had from February of 1997.  I always bought disposable cameras back then and took this picture of snow balls that I discovered in Max's freezer by mistake...  I was looking for ice.


  Max was a talented illustrator working for an advertising firm when I met her.  She was also doing her own artwork, "nocturne" style images...  always laden with snow.  We loved many of the same artists like Charles Burchfield and our personal favorite Henry Darger.  Like Maxime, Darger was obsessed with snow and chronicled the winters in Chicago throughout his lifetime.  It is also common knowledge that (like Maxime), he was devastated to the state of melancholia over any winters that produced little or no snow...    I was charmed by this child like quality in her as I myself loved snow too and was also in my own little world.  All I can say is that we bonded instantly.  We connected,  we just clicked and soon became like brother and sister by the mid nineties.

...  And then the time flew by like the wind and sooner or later time forgets all...

    The years raced by and so did many lovers, friends, good jobs, bad jobs, times of money, no money and the roller-coaster of life in New York City.  Yet, Maxime and I kept in constant contact throughout those seasons of change... until Maxime lost her life long dream of snow and herself.  I didn't realize it until after Maxime had already vanished from this world.  I turned around one day and she was gone. Her late brother was my only contact and he was not talking to anyone about what really happened to his sister.

"Dream a life, if you can't live your dream"...

  That was something that my Maxime would say to me during rough times.  I never realized how profound and tragic those words were until Maxime disappeared inside herself a few months after settling for good down in Florida.  It seems she had given up on her life long dream of finding the perfect snow storm in a world of winter and building a career of paintings, stories and art on it somehow.
   I was sitting in my writers studio, watching television (during a snow storm appropriately) when almost those same exact words that Maxime spoke to me echoed out of my ancient TV set from an old episode of "The Outer Limits" starring legendary Gloria Grahame as one of several lost souls "trapped" in a dream house.  Maxime was now trapped in her own dream house many, many miles away from where it ever snows.  She vanished from the real world soon after and is only a shadow of herself, spending endless days and nights wandering around the "dream house" with other "dreamers".  Just like Gloria Grahame they're all "trapped" inside the house without windows or doors that they can open to escape from it...  but escape to where and what?  It turns out that those lost souls did not really want to leave that dream house and have to live a life outside of the safety of their fantasy world.  It was all pretense and denial. They created that world of no doors and no windows on their own and so had Maxime.  So...

 "Dream a life,  if you can not live your dream".

   I lost contact with Maximes brother and believed that he had really disappeared on me on purpose because he wanted nothing to do with that tragedy or past,  until by a freak chance I learned that he had died, taking Maximes secrets and where abouts with him forever.
   I could never find the "dream house" where she  escaped to...  All I know is that it is just somewhere where it never snows.

"THE SPIRIT(S) IN THE BOTTLE(S)"

It is what it is...  Our next ghost story is haunted by a very different kind of "Spirit(s)".



Lower East Side late Winter 1999...


I awoke very early one November morning shivering in my loft bed.  There was no heat... as usual... and I could see swirling designs of frost on my window pain. I knew that Id never be able to fall back asleep so I stood up on the cold wooden floor, blew out fake smoke (cold breath vapor) like a cigarette and dressed quickly to run out and get some coffee.  It was pre-dawn on a Sunday and the lonely streets of the lower east side were full of rubbish but empty of the perpetrators who left it there as I made my way several blocks to the nearest diner.  I cut down a side street only to stumble upon someone sleeping on the long church steps (that almost reached the pavement) rolled up in a long down jacket like the filling in a jelly-roll.  The young guy looked strung out and disheveled as he sat up to look at me.  I was shocked to see that it was an acquaintance of mine, who only lived around the corner from me.  So why was he sleeping on the church steps at 6:30 on a cold morning when his apartment was only seven blocks away?   Sebastian shook his head, shuddered and asked me what time it was.  He stood up to announce. "Well, the Sun is up now so I can go home and sleep".   I was puzzled and perplexed by this...   He can go home because the Suns up?  I noticed two empty quart bottles amongst his jacket/sleeping bag too. I also noticed his 101 proof breath, he was still high from the night before.  He seemed disoriented and lost as we walked to the diner together.  He waited for me outside in the cold while I got my extra large java to go.  He started to mumble as we walked back towards our nabe.  Sebastian claimed that he could not stay alone in his studio at night because "visitors" would come and keep him awake ...


Lower East Side,  earlier...

   He claimed to hail from South Carolina, but his slight accent (that he desperately tried to hide) sounded much more like South America to me, than the grits and palmetto state.  I still can not remember for the life of me how I actually met Sebastian...  he was just there all of a sudden living around the corner from me and part of the "film" of my anonymous life on the lower east side of Manhattan.  He looked like a slightly darker version of Italian, screen legend Nino Castelnouvo and was constantly smoking Gitanes cigarettes in a very debonair manner. 
The first time that I saw his studio I distinctly remember that there was an empty bottle of grain liquor (same brand) with a candle in it wherever I looked.  "Not that unusual" I said to myself,  as I knew that he worked nights in an after-hours bar... that had no name.  The candle and wax laden bottles looked charming placed in the windows and amongst small tables and shelves.  It also appeared that he had decorated his flat with whatever he found on the streets on the previously well known Friday garbage nights,  ( incredible back in the day, finding mint condition antiques and furniture was status quo).  I also noticed that he had numerous books about Astrology, paranormal phenomena, some science fiction paperbacks, the Zodiac and the occult.  Sebastian told me that most of the books had been left behind by the former tenant.  He seemed to always wear red and black, if I remember correctly, with a lot of bandanas tucked in his jeans which had several large key chains hanging from them.  He had a leather belt that had the Scorpio zodiac sign on the huge, metal buckle. 
     He was a fellow east villager and local so we saw each other all the time, for coffee or talks in the park.  He didn't actually talk a lot about anything except his lost nights working at the bar and spoke even less about himself or any details about his family or his past. 
He seemed very care free at first, but would soon take a nose dive and a dark turn that autumn just before I found him sleeping on the church steps.  
I was not surprised when I heard that Sebastian started reading tarot cards and performing seances in his little studio... always illuminated by his candle "lanterns" (empty liquor bottles which were growing in numbers, rapidly).  I couldn't believe that he had possibly drank all of the liquor from the bottles alone.  I was also very busy with my life and dreams at that time and things tend to happen around you unseen.
He disappeared from the world of daylight soon after,  in fact I did not see him at all for a three month sweep, after seeing him almost daily for over one year.   I knew he was still around though, as I could see the candles flickering in his windows very late at night whenever I walked by.  I heard that he had been getting into alcohol fueled arguments at work and was seen stumbling home nightly, often mumbling to himself.  I was shocked and clueless as to what was causing him to act so different from the quiet soul that I had met the year before.  

"Secrets of the Spirits in the Bottles"...

The story started to unfold when I ran into his neighbor Raymond one windy night after Sebastian had been let go from his job at the bar... reasons unspecified.  This was only one week after discovering him "napping" on the church steps.   Ray sat me down on my stoop to tell me a bizarre story of a lost soul living in fear and paranoia since beginning his new life... living in the bottle as he put it.  Ray told me that he found Sebastian wandering around their hallway by the roof door in his underwear in the middle of the night and he whispered to Ray (so as not to be heard by the unseen) that he could not sleep in his studio unless the back light was left on,  because he claimed that the visitors came out in the darkness walking around his bed and all through his apartment the entire night, every night if he forgot to keep a light on.  He said that they would stay quiet and disappear under the floor boards and inside the walls when the light was on,  hiding just like they did in the daytime.  He said he actually saw and talked to these spirits that he believed he had personally brought about from his tarot card readings and seances... and now they would not leave him alone or leave his space.  Neighbors heard Sebastian yelling in his sleep at night or would find him wandering around the stairwell and could smell the bon fire of sage smudges that he would burn until the safety of morning and the Sun.  Now I knew what Sebastian meant that morning that I found him "camping out" on the street. 
I wanted to talk to him and see if I could help in any way that I could but that would not happen.  
It was a few weeks later that I say Ray on the street,  it was snowing and dark already and he seemed very disturbed and preoccupied in his thoughts.  He saw me and announced.  "Oh Fritz" he exhaled loudly", " I meant to ring your bell to tell you about Sebastian... he's missing".  "He left his door wide open and left everything behind, his place looks so strange".
We ran over to his building without a word, (as Ray lived in the same building and had keys to the front door), racing up the dark stairs to Sebastian's apartment.  The door was slightly ajar and I pushed it open with a quick jab.  The hall lights flooded into what now looked like a macabre cavern.  I could not fathom the countless rows of empty liquor bottles with candles all laden with melted wax.  It looked like holiday boughs and wreathes made of glass and paraffin.  There were bottles on every possible space and the room smelled like an old tavern in the morning after a night of alcohol swilling, stale booze.  It also looked like a church in a bizarre way, the area where they have all the stands of remembrance candles.  We were both stupefied as well when we turned on the wall light (and it worked) exposing a room with everything covered in dripping wax.   I felt overwhelming sadness and pity over the vision of this graveyard of liquor bottles.  How could anyone do this to themselves, and why?  
In that frozen moment, with snow and wind howling at his windows I could only stand, staring at all of this... in limbo.  I could sense something in the shadows but could not process whatever I was feeling.  Were the spirits that haunted poor Sebastian really ghosts from his past,  or former deceased tenants of the building,  or even phantoms he brought back during his Ouija board sessions and nocturnal seances?   It still remains a mystery to this day many years later sitting here late at night a million worlds away in Wheeling.  Did those spirits drive him to down and drown in those countless bottles of hard liquor (haunted by a very different type of "spirits")?  Or was there something else behind this unsolvable mystery that we just can not comprehend? 

Sebastian. Disappeared Winter of 1999

Copyright @ 2017 by Fritz Von Ludwigslust 

  

"VIOLETTA"...

I came across this delicate, little clump of violets late last winter and was instantly reminded of another ghost story... a very puzzling one about a very puzzling girl by the name of Violetta (Violet).




My lasting image of Violetta is her crying while sitting in the plush, red and silver vinyl cushioned bench of an old diner in lower Manhattan.  Smoking a clove cigarette between reapplying lipstick and powder, Violetta then deposits another dollar into the wall-o-matic juke box and presses selection 5E four more times... the weepy classic "Don't Cry Out Loud" as her tears fall into her coffee cup.  Violetta then gives out an enormous sigh that could be heard across the river in Jersey, while posing in her reflection of the diner window (like a mirror) as if she was doing a screen test for a film studio.

I have never met another character like "Violetta" in all of my adventures in New York City.  Someone who had so much melo-drama going on constantly, without anything ever really happening.  She was always done up like a modern day version of one of her many idolised "B" actresses such as a very frantic Judith Evelyn, an icy Jan Sterling or her personal favorite... a dark, mysterious Faith Domergue and all of them acting out in any moody 1950s film noir mystery or an episode of the Twilight Zone or Hitchcock.  She had short black hair (but often wore wigs, veils and hats, changing her appearance to great effect), chestnut, brown eyes and a slightly sardonic smile.  "V"'s typical "costume" was to wear many layers of black clothes and always set the "costume" off by wearing something purple, like a lavender scarf, gloves or an amethyst ring or bracelet. She loved the old film noir movies and the femme fatales that starred in them and was constantly referring to and emulating these actresses that most people had never heard of.
     We met the self appointed, mysterious femme fatale of the lower east side back in the day while hanging out in the diners of lower Manhattan that she haunted after hours... and true to her celluloid heroines she was sitting in a booth crying, stirring up her own tempest in a tea cup (sans any movie set or any real film rolling).  She just suddenly became a permanent fixture in the late night scene with us after that... no questions asked.  "V"  became one of those "B" movie queens that would appear out of nowhere, disappear again and then reappear mysteriously for the several years that we hung out together.

Never before or since have I ever met anyone so filled with conflicting contradictions and melo-drama with no foundation to support it or back it up.  Violetta would constantly be avoiding or hiding from a new paramour that we never saw or met,  they were always a shadow that we missed.  Only my former radio partner Rory Dee Koonschwanz (who's impressive track record included being fired by then boss designer Charles James on national television in between a tug of war with Salvadore Dali on the elevator of the St Regis hotel over a giant Sunflower) could compete with "V" in the three Ds...  Delusion, drama and detours.  Only these two could be one and a half hours late to meet you at a coffee shop that was only one half of a block from their apartment because of some unexplainable, urgent incident.  They would chatter, stammer and spin like a frustrated, mynah bird in heat, all over really nothing at all.  Violetta however was the biggest enigma because we never really found out where she lived or where she came from, before she disappeared forever...  after another crying stint at a diner by the Hudson river in the winter of 1994.


  Wandering souls down on the lower east side  

                             
It was a beautiful Autumn day... but not for Violetta it wasn't.  She made it seem as if it was pouring rain out... and only on her.  We were supposed to meet that noon and she told me to wait in front of a certain building on Ludlow street, where she "lived" (yet another mysterious, temporary address).   I arrived on time and the little storm cloud said a quick hello and to wait for her on the stoop,  as she had left her grape colored purse upstairs by mistake.  I started to lose my patience after twenty minutes, the breeze was chilly so I stepped up and pushed the front door... it opened.  Another ten minutes went by so I started to climb the stairs searching for her apartment and whereabouts.  I noticed a door half way open on the third floor so I walked over and peeked into the space.  I heard "V" talking on the telephone so I knew that it was her place... or was it?  The small, dimly lit apartment looked like it was inhabited by a very old lady.  There was a bright yellow Formica and chrome kitchenette and what looked like home made  doilies on the backs of the shiny chairs.   There were overgrown snake plants in 1950 style green rectangular planters in the old, weathered windows, framed by lace curtains.  All of the appliances and chachkas looked like they had been here since the 1950s,  albeit the apartment was immaculate.  I could not imagine that Violetta's home would look like this.  "V" saw me from the hallway, put down the receiver (a bright red rotary phone) and rushed over to me nervously.  She was very upset that I had entered the building and the apartment and she pushed, shoved and rushed me down and out of the building like we were cat burglars...  I was confused as to why she seemed to be afraid to remain in the apartment,  but that was that,  for the time being.  She never asked me to meet her there again.

The months and drama went by as Violetta was forever avoiding secret lovers who were harassing her...  all unseen to us.  There was Roman, Pietro and Luc among many others.  Poor "V" was swirling in a whirlpool of worldly suitors.  We never actually met any of these clandestine romeos and the mini dramas continued like a series of bad B movies being shown in a drive in theater.  We went through many dramas together until one fateful night when Violettas performances came to a mysterious close...  way, way off Broadway.
   The end came just before New Years Eve of 1994 when Violetta called me from yet another diner in downtown Manhattan.  She had just narrowly escaped being forced into an elopement with Francois, a music producer from Paris and was frantic to talk about it.  I swung by the diner on the way to my friends apartment in Battery Park city.  The wind by the river was wicked and unforgiving as I was flung into the old trailer style diner by it with great force.  There was "V" on her throne, overly made up and pancaked to death, smoking a clove cigarette and crying into her signature coffee cup.  She was also singing along to her one selection which she had on repeat play...  the classic tear jerker "Heart breaker".  She looked very Ruth Roman circa "Down 3 Dark Streets" that night and kept adjusting her lilac coloured scarf as she wept softly.  It seemed to be her "pie in the sky", but a very bitter pie made of acidic rhubarb and sour cherries.  She sobbed another tale of melo-drama to me and all I could do was give her a hug and wish her a Happy New Year...   I would never see Violetta again and I still felt like I knew her even less than I did when I met her three years before.   It was like a scene from the classic film "The Lady Vanishes".  She disappeared forever...  but why?

Next Summer Lower East side...

I found myself on Ludlow street seven months or so after Violetta's disappearance.  I looked up and realized I was at the doorstep of the very building that I met her at on that one odd day,  that was supposedly her residence.  I decided to take a chance and ring the doorbell of the apartment number that I remembered from two years before.  There was no response, I tried again.  All of a sudden what appeared to be the superintendent of the old tenement building stepped out to greet me.  He asked who I was looking for.  I responded a young girl named Violetta who had lived there in that apartment at least two years before.  The super told me that the only tenant from that particular apartment was an elderly woman by the name of Mrs Entemann who had lived there for over forty years. She had just gone into a nursing home and the apartment was being readied for the new tenant.  He told me the name of the home where she at now.  I called the next day and Mrs Entemann seemed confused by my questions on the telephone.  I told her that i had been in her apartment with a girl named Violetta several summers before and I described her yellow kitchen set and snake plants. She was flabbergasted as she had no idea who Violetta was.  There was dead silence and I heard her gasp and breath heavy.  She asked me to describe "Violetta" and I did in detail.  Mrs Entemann started to weep.  It seems that she had a great niece who was institutionalized and who would visit her once a month as an out patient.  "Sharma" had been a lonely girl who lost her parents young and lost herself in a world of fantasies and illusions, she could not function in the outside world.  She had gone missing during a fire in the ward back in 1991 that destroyed several buildings and was presumed dead with several other patients.  Mrs Entemann went on to describe Sasha finishing with...  and she loved the color purple.  I dropped the receiver from the payphone that I was calling from on avenue C.   All of a sudden the picture became clear, the made up dramatic scenarios and the imagined Casanovas.  The poor soul was still living in a fantasy world even on the outside of the institution walls that she escaped from.  I was deeply saddened by this tragic revelation...  Where would she go? What would she do?  She was a gentle spirit that just seemed to want to live in a dream, or better yet live a life of fantasy acting out in an endless dream of a series of film noir movie scenes.  Violetta and/or Sharma were now seemingly gone forever, or were they?


Violetta disappeared Winter of 1994.
Last seen in a diner on the lower east side

Copyright February 2017 @ by Fritz Von Ludwigslust
All Rights Reserved.

"DUTCH-(TRICK OR)-TREAT" ...

This Dior leather wallet belonged to a vivacious doll named "Dutch", short for Duchess... or so she claimed that it was her real name.  She was yet another outrageous "supporting" (and sometimes non-supporting) actress from the film of my anonymous life in lower Manhattan decades ago.  I seemed to be the most stable and sane soul from that film so many of the wandering characters crashed... leaving many personal belongings behind, like this Dior wallet and the star filled disco head band below.  I have tried to hold on to all of these trinkets from the past... all of them spirited and conjuring up the ghost stories of their former owners.


  "I'm gonna put these 37-Cs into a 36B halter top and do some damage out on the runway (sidewalk) today Fritzy",  my long gone Vargas girl Duchess sighed to me from her tiny pink bathroom as I sat out on her fire escape watching a cock pigeon huff and puff all over the rooftop trying to impress several females and one curious mourning dove.   Duchess or "Dutch" to the small hand of close friends that could call her that was like a giant cherry vanilla sundae with extra whipped cream and giant crunchy, sweet red maraschino cherries.  She looked just like all of the many sex kittens and screen sirens that she obsessed over all wrapped into one.  Today she was very Dyan Cannon in "The Last of Sheila",  but just last week it was a very zaftig Ann-Margret in "The Outside Man".   "Dutchy" made her living in and out of the clubs as well as several other "venues"... a merry-go-round so to speak.  She was very feminine most of the time but its also true that Dutch could be just like one of the boys as well...  She could drink them all under the table and had the mouth of a truck driver from the meat packing district on the west side highway. She could also read you like a comic book if need be.  You did not mess with Dutch, or you could end up a mess.  The lady was as tough as nails if called for, but she was also very kind and thoughtful at times.   She could be a trick or a treat in many ways and would do things like order extra food when frequently taken out to dinner by many admirers, just to bring it home to us less fortunate souls.  Half kitten and half tiger she was always a teasing contradiction.
   We became very close and Dutchy would pull many "all nighters" with us over the years.  We would rent films from Kim's Videos or Blockbuster and watch them until morning drinking coffee.  Always inventive, if she ran out of coffee filters she would use Charmin toilet paper instead.  Our friend interior designer extraordinaire Augusto turned us on to such now beloved films as "In The Spirit",  the timeless "Grey Gardens",  "Juliet of the Spirits" and "Choose Me".
   Duchess also commanded attention wherever she went with her sexy charismatic smile and full tilt sex kitten energy.  With a Farrah mane of copper brown hair,  hazel, exotic almond shaped eyes and dangerous curves, Dutch also attracted much unwanted attention. I always worried that she would come to a tragic, violent end, but hoped that she wouldn't.  It was just this eerie feeling I had inside about her.
   Her mysterious death at the age of only 28 from "natural causes" has never been solved.  She was found fully dressed (and seemingly posed they said) and permanently "asleep" on her knees holding onto her mesh, clutch bag and a satin pillow on the giant, round, bed of her small, east river side apartment after vanishing for several weeks prior to being discovered.  Those last two weeks were a bizarre film clip of Dutch being seen here and there, only to go missing and be out of contact from everyone for days at a time in between.
  Dutch liked her champagne and a little of this and a little of that too... as well as her craving at times to go to an after-hours and dance the night away.  Unpredictable and definitely a bundle of 37-24-36 trouble, she was a keg of dynamite always only several inches away from a lit match.

Dutch loved disco music and the clubs.  This is one of her famous disco head bands that she would wear out at night.  I found it as a book mark that I was using in an old paperback titled (appropriately) "Slaves of New York".  It took me awhile and a flashback to remember that it was hers, left behind in my old west village studio years ago.
  ...I can still recall her telling me that she would have worn it as a tube top if it was a little bigger...
 This outrageous yet endearing behavior (and bawdy comments) made Dutch irresistible to many.  She was especially sweet to me and I was devastated when she passed away the shockingly, unexpected way that she did amidst a complete change in her personality and demeanor just weeks before her untimely end.

"The last two weeks" ...

It was late October, autumn with sunny days and windy, crisp nights when Dutch started to act very unusual and more than a little paranoid.  She also had a complete turn around in her choice of music and films.  Dutch was listening to a much more cerebral (and I found a little sad) avant-garde music like Arthur Russell... very shadowy, echoey and tragic.  She also seemed newly obsessed with films that dealt with heavy psychologically disturbing  themes.  I still recall struggling to sit through a 1988 film "Paper House" with her... I found it very disturbing and not the "family entertainment" she claimed it would be.   It was also around this time of change that Dutch became a walking, moving (and often missing) shadow.  Friends would tell me that they would see Dutch out late at night and she would ignore them as if they weren't there.  She would give them a bizarre-smiling stare and then disappear.  One close friend of hers Rory ran into her at four a.m. in the morning on a deserted avenue A, only to be told "Yes I see you Rory" as she then swept by never stopping or looking back.  Everyone was flabbergasted at this cold, detached behavior.  She would no longer answer her telephone in her apartment and there was no way of telling if she was actually at home or "somnom-bulling" around lower Manhattan.  We found out later that she had been fired from her job.  She had just stopped going to work... with no call and no explanation.  Dutch also stopped talking to all of her neighbors who she was very warm and friendly with before. She would just act as if they were invisible whenever she ran into them.  Some even claimed she attempted to hide from them, in full view, by just standing still and quiet thinking that noone would see her there.

 I had one disturbing encounter with the "new" Dutch by freak chance.  I was coming home
 well after midnight when an acquaintance of mine Duncan told me that he had just seen the Duchess at an after hours dump off of Bowery... and she was looking and acting bizarre.  I rushed over and down into the subterranean lounge to find a dark intimate space lit up with large strings of old fashioned Christmas lights and lanterns, some drapped over plastic palm trees.  There were small round areas like little rooms with tables and chairs on different levels like a mod disco.  There was a small performance stage which was now being used to play music videos.  I spotted Dutch sitting very regally in a large cushioned chair facing the stage as "Why" by Annie Lennox came on.  Dutch glared glassy eyed straight ahead, stiff and puppet like.  I stared at her for the whole time of the video until "No Ordinary Love" by Sade came on.  She never flinched or looked my way but I knew she could see me standing there.  I was perplexed and actually a little angry but I decided to do nothing.  I could see a strange, cruel half smile on the side of her face as I slipped up and out of the lounge.  Ill never forget that image as long as I live... haunting.  Of course we didn't know of her wanderings at that time and didn't find out about this and other strange facts until long after her seemingly unsolved and mysterious death.
We heard nothing from Dutch for one whole week (we always kept daily contact before) when Rory decided to call her and leave a message which he had not done up until this point.  He dialed the number nervously as Dutch could be unpredictable as I wrote before.  We were all so quiet that would could actually hear her telephone ring from the receiver in Rory's hand.  We could also here Dutch's greeting and what seemed like ten minutes of beeps due to a barrage of unlistened-to messages.  Rory a stand up comic in the name of bad taste blurted out...   "Dutch if you haven't killed yourself, I'm gonna kill you for not answering this #### phone!"  He hung up and we thought... Oh well that's that, lets see what happens now.
Two policeman showed up at chez Rory's the next morning, questioning him about the threatening message that he had left Dutch.  Rory just exclaimed that they should ask the Duchess herself, as they always joked around in this manner.  The policemen said nothing, except that "June's" sister was taking care of the situation.  Who was June and what situation we all thought?  We found out from Dutch's neighbor Mrs Fettbein that the Duchess had been found dead in her apartment the day before.  No one knew anything as her sister was there and would not speak to anyone about anything.  There was no report in the paper and no known service for the Duchess.  Her sister would not agree to meet any of her friends either.  We went to the local police station to be coldly greeted by a poker faced clerk who said that the case was a closed book with no suspicion of any foul play.  We were shocked...  how could anybody die of natural causes at 28 years old?  The sister came and went like the wind and all traces of Dutch were gone, like dust in that wind.  True to the life and death of all of the previous ghosts in my stories, we never found out what her real name was.  We never knew what her sisters name was either or where she came from.  The mystery grew and grew, only to be filed with all of my other ghost tales under unsolved.

It was several years later on a cold, icy night in March that I had a series of cloudy flashbacks about Dutch and her puzzling end.  I sat huddled in my easy chair watching a foreign film while the wind whipped furiously outside of my window.  It almost seemed as if the wicked wind was angry.  It set the scene for a psychological mystery film from 1975... "Footprints on the Moon" a movie from Italy with Florinda Balkon and the incredible Caterina Boratto.  It was about a woman who was haunted by flashbacks from her youth, flashbacks that seemed to be foretelling of her tragic future and demise.  I was spellbound watching the scenes moment to moment until the climactic ending.   It was in that final scene that I saw Dutch's face not Florinda's as she was being restrained by two bizarre men in astronaut gear to be taken away to a sanatorium.  I sat back in a trance remembering Dutch's bizarre and mostly unknown final weeks before the formerly vivacious and animated minx was found, alone and dead under very mysterious circumstances.  Perhaps no one else in the universe knows what really happened to the Duchess, not even her sister... except maybe "June", whoever she really was.




Dutch.  Last seen hiding in the shadows of the night...

Copyright @ 2016.  Written by Fritz Von Ludwigslust.  All Rights Reserved

"LONE-STAR" ...

A tiny, silver star lodged into the cracks of an old sidewalk on the lower East Side amongst gum smudges, cigarette butts and deteriorating pavement.  This is a cell pic of an old photo I took during my early years of wandering Lower Manhattan during the "filming" of my anonymous life there.  The first thing that came to my mind when I found this photo in a book of poems by Eichendorff was my next ghost story...  "Lone-Star",  another long lost spirit who was just one in a million of countless "stars" in the old galax-city of New York.


...Soho, Manhattan.   Yuletide 1999... 

 I found myself looking at the Christmas window displays in the small shops in Soho on a cold December day, when I froze in my steps at the sight of an unusual holiday arrangement that was brightly illuminated in one particular boutique.  It was a giant piece of driftwood that was atop a glittery snow "blanket" that was bedecked with twinkling lights,  tinsel, ornaments and five or six large, very shiny beads bags or pouches that gave me a shuddering deja-vu as I stood there staring at them in the cold, darkening air.  "Star",  I whispered to myself... a long lost friend that had disappeared in the late Autumn of 1991 after tragic disappointment and disillusionment.  I rushed into the shop to ask the clerk about the all too familiar creations that were hanging in this window many years after he vanished.  I was stunned to hear that the "artist" who had hand made these very expensive items had passed away sometime in the early 1990s... or had he?  We must now go back another decade to tell the story of "Lone-Star".



It was mid Summer of 1989 and I was a teenager drifting along the banks of the Hudson on the lower half of Manhattan.   I grabbed a can of soda to take a break and relax by the river, when I happened upon my next ghost story,  purely by chance.  I was daydreaming (which I did very well back then), looking out at the Hudson river when my lazy eyes caught a familiar sight amongst all the urban-niss of the waterfront.  It was a bird that was diving gracefully in and out of the pier pilings and docks.  All of a sudden I heard a voice behind me say... "Its a barn swallow".  Well, I knew that already because we had many barn swallows that nested in the eaves of our boathouse and cottage on a lake in the far north close to Quebec.  I looked back to see where the voice came from, it was a studious, book-wormish looking character who was wearing a red flannel shirt, old fashioned dungarees and work boots.  He sat down a few feet from me to tell me that he was from the Dakotas where these type of swallows were common and numerous.  I introduced myself and was immediately taken aback when he told me that his name was "Star".   I thought he was joking until he explained that his real name was Stern (the German version of Star).  I already knew that was what it meant, anyone with a name like mine would know why.
We hit it off right away because we were just two nomadic souls from the rural North traversing the dangerous waters that surrounded the city.  He reminded me of a very young Franchot Tone circa the 1933 film "Bombshell" as far as actors go and he seemed to have the same cool, classy temperament as that film star.  He was also an old soul like me but he was more obsessed with the country-western genre of  music, prairie songs, classic western films and clothes.   We were also very similar in many ways as far as behavior and habits went.  He would sometimes sit outside by the river, very quiet and stoic oblivious to anything around him for a whole afternoon, which I also did.  Others found it peculiar, I didn't at all in fact I found it to be the norm.  Star would also sit alone in the dark in his studio or on his roof for hours after midnight (even in the snow in Winter),  just "being" in the moment.  I realize now many years later that it was our unique way of meditating and healing (day and night), without understanding that that was exactly what we were doing back then.  I can recall now just in this very moment that he was always listening to the "Cherokee Cowboy" (Ray Price) at home... it was THE  soundtrack playing in his little studio.

I was already working at the cafe carousel and had a lot of free time during the days to hang out back then.  Neither of us had a telephone so we would just show up at each others doors or meet by the river.  Everyone came to New York City for one specific or many different reasons back then and Star was no different from all of the other dreamers in that respect.  He was originally from a farm but had also lived in the big city out there where he had extended family... Pierre, South Dakota.  Star's family were also of part American Indian descent like mine and he had spent time with people from the tribe there learning handcrafts, especially beading jewelry, belts and other items.  This special talent would soon possess Star to create his own "line" of clothing accessories that would become very popular in Manhattan...  but it would also bring about his undoing and tragic disappearance due to his naive disposition and inability to adapt to the often ruthless, exploitative and tough world of art and "fashion" in the make it or break it concrete island of New York.
I discovered Star's true, unique talent one day when I showed up unannounced at his studio-work shop.  He was sitting in the window and appeared to be "weaving" something small and was surrounded by little bowls of shiny objects.  He told me that Tuesdays were his "beading" day, when he put the finishing touches on the coin pouches and belts that he created.  I was amazed at the incredible detail
of each project that he had made by hand.  They were truly a work of art so I was not surprised when he told me that he sold them to many shops in the Soho area.  He was incredibly talented and I was sure that big things would happen for him.  I was also amazed at the amount of time that he put into each creation, some took a week with countless hours of tedious hand work.
I also remember being very surprised that he always seemed to be broke despite the fact that he was working on his art all night, every night like magic elves in an old man's cobbler shop.  His life seemed to be right out of a Grimm's Brothers Fairy tale... in 1989 lower Manhattan.  I found out the real appalling reason for his lack of green and gold by chance when I accompanied him to drop off some of his pieces at a shop in Soho.

It was a brisk early morning that I ran into Star by chance on the street.  We decided to get our morning coffees together and drink them down by the river, after he dropped off ten of his new pieces at a shop close by on the way.  It was a quaint little store, but I disliked the owner immediately who completely ignored me as we entered but approached Star like a black widow spider that just discovered a new moth caught in its web.  I sound found out that it was a shameless web made out of exploitation, degradation and outright cheating the outsider artists who provided the evil spider with the very "ornaments" that were to be sold in her cavern of deception.  She grabbed the beaded treasures out of Star's hands and inspected each like it was the hope diamond... under a critical microscope.  I could see just how naive and gullible Star was for the first time.  I was floored when she stuffed them in a bag and said "OK, this is how much I owe you", as she scribbled 80$ down on an old receipt book.  Surely she must have meant at least thirty dollars each, they were true works of hard labor and art.  I went outside to wait and to question Star when he came exited the spiders lair.  I couldn't help but shout out...  "You've got to be kidding, you can not be serious?" "80 dollars for all of that work?"  "Please tell me that this is not true, 12 dollars for each piece?"  Star just stepped back startled and confused, he could not understand my reaction.  He tried to explain the situation but I was not buying it and we drank our coffee in silence.  I could tell that he was taken aback by my reaction but I could also sense that I had "opened his eyes" to this unfair and abusive union of his and those shop keepers in Soho.
I don't think that Star slept well for several nights after this revelation and I believe this is when he started to take another approach to selling his intricate hand works.

I didn't see Star for over a week after that last meeting and when I did he was very quiet and "to-himself".  I had done some investigating on my own and discovered that the spider was making a huge profit off of Star, as if he was nothing but a sweat shop slave.  I called the black widow from a payphone on Mulberry street to inquire about the price range of the beaded goods that I was interested in.  "65 dollars for the smaller, 75 for the larger" she groused,  her mouth filled with food... or another victim she was exploiting like Star.  I was even more shocked at Star's reaction... dead silence, embarrassment and even more intense detachment from everything.  Star went into a tailspin that he never came out of after that, at least not to my knowledge.  He started drinking heavily, staying home in the dark and avoiding daylight until he eventually disappeared one day.  He began to act very strange when I would see him, whispering stories to me about will-o-the -wisps and other small spirits that had taken over his apartment and would not let him rest or sleep.  This went on for several weeks before he turned into a shut in and he became very gaunt and pale in a short period of time.  I woke up one chilly October morning and I knew that he was gone...  I still don't know how.  His landlord told me that Star just left and left everything behind.   I went to see his abandoned apartment and did see that he had left almost everything there as was to my memory,  except I did notice that all of his "beading" materials were gone.  I took a few of his favorite books and plants to keep for him in case he did come back...  He didnt and I never saw him again.  He had a close friend in his building, a girl named Lana who I had met several times.  She was also totally clueless as to what happened to Star.   Lana and I kept in touch for several years after that until we lost all contact when she got married and moved to South Carolina.   I felt pangs of guilt... maybe I should have said nothing to him about his moth and black widow spider situation.  How could I have let that go on though, watching this talented artist get milked dry for nothing until they didn't need or want him anymore.  The life of a true artist or even worse an outsider artist can be cruel and thankless.  This is not how it should be, the human world needs art, music and creation to really be human, grow and advance into the future.

I felt a deep pang of sadness when I found the photo above in a book of "Gedichte" by one of my favorite authors Josef F. V. Eichendorff.  It was very appropriate as Star was also a true artist.  He disappeared in the Autumn of 1991 and I wonder if he is still out there somewhere working on his craft and receiving the same fair treatment and integrity we all deserve.  Star was nothing like the reckless "Meteors" that I have written about before, not at all.  He was more like a shooting star that radiates quietly, then fades away leaving a warm glow to the cosmos.

It still reminds me of the final minutes of the classic film "The Incredible Shrinking Man" as Grant Williams vanishes under the moon and stars forgotten,  or even a stunning Joan Crawfords final scene in the magnificent film "Humoresque", where she walks off into the ocean and the other side forever.  Soft pathos.

The beaded handwork that I found of Stars in that shop in Soho was now selling for over one hundred dollars a piece.  What a disgrace that he never profited from all that hard work, incredible imagination and labor of love.

Star...  Disappeared Autumn of 1991.
Last seen... The lone Star fell, shone bright and then vanished in the sky over Manhattan


Copyright@ 2016 by Fritz Von Ludwigslust.  All Rights Reserved.