"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