"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.