"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.