"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.

"REVLON'S GHOST"...

He was a shadow from the New York club scene in the late 1980's and 1990's that fled Manhattan amongst outrageous rumours and nefarious scandals in the winter of 1999... but not before a short stint in Greenland (where Mr Revlon was last sighted), after finishing his studies in Taxidermy and about to begin a career in preserving rare arctic animals in the town of Nuuk (Godthåb).


Revlon was a mystery to me, a highly intellectual, kind spirited and philosophical soul who somehow ended up diving head first into the often soul-devouring and tragic world of the Manhattan club scene.  We worked together at the Cafe-Carousel where we became fast friends.  I often joked with him about his desperation to get into the city from Jersey.  Some of my typical comments would be that he either swam the Hudson or built a life raft out of pier pilings to get to the other side.  We had a lot of fun and many laughs working together amongst a cranky crew of mostly elderly waitresses. It didn't take long for Revlon to socialize and start hitting the rampant night life that existed back then. I was happy for him but very surprised to discover that he was soon running with a group of club kids, despite the fact that he was an unusually kind-hearted and seemingly reserved spirit, but he had a deep, dark side that was well hidden... for the time being at least.
We worked well together and had a blast on those late night shifts alone as a duo at the cafe.  We even developed our own way of speaking to each other with exaggerated Jersey City accents glazed with upper crust outbursts and antidotes.  We would also speak our language with an almost sing-song type of cantor always dropping the "R"s in our words, in a very trans-atlantic style of lingo.

A few months went by and Revlon moved from Journal Square to a share in Brooklyn and then finally to a small basement studio not far from the Hudson that he had struggled to cross once and for all.  He acquired the studio after a career move into the club scene that he was already a fixture in.  Mr Revlon became a renowned "lighting wizard" who also specialized in "nocturnal-decor".  Despite all of this he remained the same kind and warm soul that I had met when he was still a little wet from that first Hudson crossing.  He was becoming a little more secretive though, causing me to rename him the "Deadly Nightshade", partly in " honor" of his new nocturnal entourage.

Revlon's view of the past.  On a frigid winter day a look across the Hudson towards New Jersey.

More time went by as Revlon got deeper and deeper into the often dangerous world of New York City's club scene.  He continued to work part time at the Carousel and I'm sure he had no way of knowing that the scene that he was entrenched in would one day be the reason for him leaving New York City forever.  I never made it to any of the infamous venues that Revlon worked, despite getting on the guest list every night thanks to him.  I was also a nocturnal creature but far more secretive and much more into quiet, intimate scandalous affairs as opposed to Revlon's huge glittering and highly promoted spectacles.  Revlon himself remained an enigma and very closed mouth about his over the top night-life.
   I did not fit in with his new crowd... nor did I want to.  He was soon associating with the kind of characters that could throw shade in a padlocked, window-less basement in the middle of a moonless winter night.  The boy from Journal Square was soon spinning out of control.  Revlon would leave the Carousel ducking out of the back door with an extra large Styrofoam container filled with ice and Burgundy wine,  Vantage menthol lights and head off for parts unknown.  This is when I started to feel him detaching from everyone around him.
I would often swing by his basement flat at all hours and scratch on the window.  We would have drinks, talk and go for walks.  It was after three trips by his nest that I noticed a weird stillness to his place.  It wasn't that he just didn't respond to visitors, it was the feeling that he was not there anymore.  It turned out that Revlon had indeed moved out in a hurry after witnessing a series of horrific events in the club scene.  He had fallen into a situation where he was "involved" without really being involved in some frightening going-ons.
The college boy with admirable medical and scientific knowledge was now on the lam. Rumours flew but were also very hush-hush as no one wanted to be a part of whatever had transpired.  I would mention his name to  former acquaintances who would only give me a startled look and just walk away.
You have to understand that I was very fond of him and felt a kindredness that was rare in the city at that time.  Everyone else was on their own cosmic trip, their own fantasy Island.  Being around Revlon was like co-starring in the classic film "Slaves of New York" meets "Diner"... everything could and did happen.  I remember now his expertise on the dance floor and his love of free style classics like "I'm Hooked on You" and "Full Circle".  He could turn it out anywhere, even on the sidewalk.  Yet, there was a very quiet, dark and private side to him that he never showed to another soul.  We had many connections despite the fact that he was a city boy and I was a hayseed from the mountains. We had similar tragic family lives and missing Fathers.  This was all being left in the dust now as Revlon was definitely being driven to drastic measures and being driven out of New York City by dangerous characters.
The last message that I left on his answering machine was a series of x- rated nursery rhymes (I was famous for them),   but for the first time in our personal history, there were no typical dry, witty replies from my friend  Mr R.  He then seemed to cut everyone from his past off with the precision of a surgical knife.  He was now just a phantom, an elusive shadow, a ghost.
I heard sometime later that he landed deep in the heart of Texas for awhile, working in the medical field while getting his certificate in Taxidermy.
I then heard nothing for years until an acquaintance told me that Revlon was in town for a day before taking off to Greenland to work as a government taxidermist who would preserve the wildlife of the tundra like Musk Oxen, Puffins and Weasels, way up there above the Arctic circle.  Revlon did set foot in Nuuk only to vanish into thin air never to be seen again.  The only thing more mysterious than his disappearance in Greenland are the real reasons why he felt compelled to flee New York and then the United States.  One thing for sure is that no one is talking... especially not Revlon's Ghost.


Revlon disappeared Winter of 1999 only to resurface in 2003 before vanishing forever... Last seen... Nuuk, Greenland
Copyright @ 2016 by Fritz Von Ludwigslust.  All Rights Reserved.

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