for my little hank...

my beautiful friend hank, who has been part of my life for the past 10 years, was looking worse for wear lately. we began our friendship after i fell in love with him at the mayhew cats home in north london so many years ago. at the time, he was named "simba" and he stood out to me from all the other cats, (apart from an absolutely enormous pair of cats, in a size i have never seen a domestic cat, so large my friend claire who had come with me said, " jesus! i thought those things were extinct!)".

his green eyes were large and full of love. his coat was gorgeous and thick and shiny. i loved his little "goatee' spot on his chin. and he looked like he was smiling. he was friendly and let me hold him right away. claire said, " he is defintely a jakki cat!" although all the other cats were nice, he was the one. i named him hank and took him home and until last night, for all these years he was a wonderful friend to me.

i have a lot of good and happy memories, but the time i reflect on most was a pretty horrible period of my life where my faithful and caring friend, lay by my side, day after day, stretched out long along side me, looking after me, keeping me company, purring away.

having children took my attention away from him. i didn't have as much time for him as i once did. he was still the faithful friend. me? my guilt will never leave me.

so frail, i watched him walk around the house, trying to find a comfortable place to sleep, not eating much, drinking way too much, obviously not well. i hoped he would get better. the vet gave me some steroids and i was hopeful this would bring back the friend i knew. i tried so many different foods, treats, but still he lost weight. i so wanted him to get better. but yesterday, as i watched him, as much as i didn't want to, i could see his suffering. i went to the vet knowing what the outcome might be. as i guess with all of these things, we hope there will be a last minute reprieve, a sudden answer that will make everything better. she said we could try some things, he might respond to chemo, but, as we both could see, he was obviously dying. usually, he would try to jump off the table, but now, he just lay there, skin and bones, so tired.

the decision, to let my friend go, has left me so heartbroken. as i watched him go to sleep, a part of me went with him.

i wonder where he is now. he won't be back with me at home until next tuesday. as much as i try not to think about it, i want to imagine he is somewhere soft and safe until his ashes come home.
scott is going to make him a beautiful pot to keep his ashes. i will feel better when he comes back.
there is a large presence missing in the house. 
i miss you...
rest in peace hank... xox

carry on camping...

a few weeks back we went to a birthday party in the woods and it was fantastic. my friends mom owns about 70 acres of a wood in a sweet little town called appledore. it was so tranquil and beautiful and adjacent to a massive field which the farmer may or may not have been totally pissed off we were running through. but he never came and told us off, so i figure we're good.
so my big plan has been to get our own tent so we can spend the summer as nomads... exploring new places... adventure is out there... where we pitch our tent is home... slightly idealistic i know, but...i can't let myself think of the reality.

my ideal camping situation would involve a beautiful airstream, but since i'm pretty sure i will never own one, i have been watching tents obsessively on ebay... as though i have nothing else to do... waiting for my dream tent to come along. pretty much to scott's horror, i haven't been looking at anything practical. i'm just all about the aesthetics. which the entire family will probably suffer for. as soon as discovered vintage frame tents i fell in love.

i have eaten, slept and breathed tents... absolutely massive tents that slept up to 12, tents with kitchens added-on, tents with bathroom areas, tents that were completely like just bringing your house with you and i have had to let most of them go when they got to crazy money. but tonight, i nearly felt my heart beat out of my chest when i won this little beauty in the last 5 seconds of the auction for not too much moolah. sure, i don't know if it will leak ...sadly, i don't think there are any instructions to tell me how to put it up... it probably won't even fit in my car, but i love looking at it. it's bright and happy (and i pray to god waterproof) and i hope we get to put it to good use.

ruby dixie shooting star necklace

wow... very cool! this sunday's "fabulous" magazine featured our "shooting star" necklace. get yours here.

dalston vintage fashion fair

if you love vintage clothing, jewellery, homewares...jazz, blues, swing, burlesque you won't want to miss the dalston vintage fashion fair saturday july 9th from 10.30-6.00. ruby dixie will be there with a selection of vintage sparkles and trashy treasure. if you are in london come stop by and see us! click here more info!

a really nice surprise...

i hate to admit it... but i do google "ruby dixie" from time to time to see if i come across any little blurbs about us online that i may have otherwise never been aware of. i was very surprised and pleasantly chuffed that i found this page on a fashion blog featuring some ruby dixie jewellery. thank you! x

hollywood days and sherman part 2

and now...the rest of the story...

when jill, dominic and i arrived at the hospital to visit sherman, a nurse directed us to where his room was. we walked past the open door and i caught a brief glimpse of him lying on the bed in a hospital gown that was hiked up, completely showing off his bare essentials. there was no way in hell i was going in there when that was on display. it was definitely not a vision i wanted burned into my retinas for the rest of eternity. jill and i kept urging dominic to go in there first and tell sherman to pull his gown down.  he had a stronger stomach than the two of us, but he let us know there was no way in hell HE was going to do it either.

as we stood outside the room going back and forth with each other arguing over who would go in there first, a nurse walked past and saw us standing out there. she kind of reminded me of shirley hemphill from "what's happenin". she asked what was going on and i pointed around the corner into the room motioning at sherman and his display. she walked in there all huffy like this was not the first time she'd dealt with this and as she pulled his gown to cover him she said, "SHERMAN, how many TIMES do i have to TELL you, keep your gown DOWN! you got company". she turned and said, "he's always got his gown all up like that. hmph" and walked off.

we made our way in and put the basket down. we started to make small talk, but to be honest, i don't think he knew who we were. i can't even remember what small talk we made with him. i just remember that all of a sudden, the conversation got a bit freakishly x-rated. out of the blue, he started making all sorts of suggestions about what jill and i could do with each other and asking really nasty, graphic questions and he was starting to chase us around the room when we decided to cut our visit short. it kind of freaked me out.

sherman was in the hospital for a week or so. when he came back, i didn't speak to him for a bit. i avoided him. i was still feeling weird about the hospital visit. one afternoon, i came home from work and sitting by our front door was this ratty, dirty stuffed mouse teddy bear thing with a note pinned on it. i think it was addressed to "linda" or "josephine". it was pretty obvious who it was from. but the  question was who was it for?

the note had part of the "wicky wicky" song typed on it and professed an undying love for linda or josephine or whoever it was. a few days later, i came home to find another crusty old teddy bear with another note. this happened a few times. then one day, the phone rang. i could tell it was sherman. he asked, "can i speak to linda?"

"there's no linda here."

he said, "oh... um... you know... the girl with the long dark hair"

"you mean jakki?" i asked

"YES! yes, that's it... jakki."

"er...it's me sherman...this is jakki"

"oh linda...(getting it wrong again) all i can think about is you". ( which just grossed me out ...because... you know... i was familiar with the way he "thought " about people. ) "when i was in the hospital, you were like this shining light that came to save me. all i could think about was you. the hope of seeing you again is what saved my life."

jesus christ. this was so not what i needed.

he continued, "i was wondering, (his voice became more demure and flirty) if you would be so kind as to accompany me for lunch...... at my mothers. "

oh my god.

"um, sherman...i don't think so. i'm...er...married..." ( i lied)

"where's your husband?"

"he lives in another state. it's very complicated, but...it works and we're madly in love, so...thanks but no thanks."

he didn't take no for an answer very easily, so the gifts still flowed. flea-ridden, piss-stained tokens of his love kept appearing on the doorstep.  what freaked me out more though, was i swear, every time i saw mrs. lieberman, i could actually see a ray of hope in her watery blue eyes. like this was the beginning of something beautiful. as if a relationship between her son and i could be a possibility.

in  the end, he found some other chick to crush on, the girlfriend of one of his homeless friends. and there is a story there, that almost put me off the idea of ever "knowing' anyone in the biblical sense for the rest of my lifetime. it's too horrific to recount here. it took me years to erase it from my brain.

a few years ago, when i was back in LA, jill and i drove by the old place. a lot had changed. it was pretty obvious to me that sherman was no longer living there. we sat outside reminiscing, laughing about our crazy days there. we remembered this video that dominic had found in sherman's place of sherman from years before we ever knew him. it looked like late 70s/early 80's. he was in a polyester shirt, open... with medallion, high-waisted polyester trousers, sporting a seriously blow-dried do and standing in front of a pretty nice house. he was talking to the camera, saying that what he was filming, was his "epitaph".

he gave the viewer a guide inside of his house. even at that point in his life, he was creative with the decor. he had chairs nailed to the walls and ceiling. scraps of various carpets made up whole floor coverings in every room. it was interesting to see this kind of mad, yet,  maybe just eccentric side of him. i still get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach sometimes when i think about the fact we never made a copy of it.

while jill and i were still in the car talking, one of the new residents of the four-plex came out and i asked if she had ever known sherman. she had similar stories of near death by paint fumes and mrs. lieberman sending maverick or whatever other unqualified person was hanging around with sherman to fix serious problems like gas leaks etc...  she said that mrs. lieberman had been ill and sent/went back to her home state to live with family a few years previously.  i asked about sherman and she said he had to leave after his mom moved. her husband had seen him a year or two earlier, living on the streets, not far away from 1432. without his mom there to look after him, he lost what little he had. i felt sad about that for a long time... still do.

(i spent the past 3 days digging through the thousands of letters, photos, scraps of papers i have kept my entire life because i know i have a letter or two from him and i can't find them. so disappointing!)

hollywood days and sherman...

ace and i

i was talking with a friend a few days ago about the old hollywood days. not the era of glamorous starlets and scandals and lunching at the brown derby, although i could talk about that for days, but MY old hollywood days. i am really missing home. especially when the sun is shining here, it reminds me of california.

i used to live at 1432 s crescent heights in west LA with 2 of my best friends jill and dominic.  then when dominic moved, ace lafayette still III moved in. ace used to equate the household to the sitcom "three's company". and i guess it kind of was. i had been living with my mom in marina del rey when jill and dominic first moved to 1432. it was a really cool 1930's apt over a double garage at the back of a four-plex. i was so jealous when i saw the place with it's vintage tiling, arched doorways and wood floors. as it turned out, i had to move out of my moms shortly after they moved in, so i was very happy to make it my home too.

jill

the day they had originally gone to view the place, they were shown around by the landlady mrs lieberman. a woman of about 70 with a strawberry blond, slight beehive and a penchant for 2 piece polyester pant suits. she explained to jill and dominic that her son, sherman, didn't live there, but used the 2 garages downstairs from our potential apt as an office. he was a writer and he was working on the new "star wars" script. in fact, george lucas had just been there the day before. although i was intrigued, i don't know why, but something in me was slightly skeptical.

sherman

i'm not sure how long we were living there before we realized that sherman also lived there... in the garages...with his 2 dogs. in fact, the first day i moved in, i had a beautiful welcome from his dog cottonball, (who was possibly white under all the dirt), in the form of him hacking up a thick loogie, complete with grass, onto my bare leg as i unpacked the car. niiiccceeee.

slowly we began to see that life at 1432 was going to be very entertaining. sherman, who was about mid-50s, was an eccentric, amphetamine junkie that was basically friends with every homeless person and junkie within a 10 mile radius. he was up at all hours, painting and re-painting the garage below us and then paint removing and then painting all over again pretty much 24/7. once he decided to paint the path outside our place, which he then decided he didn't like. unbeknownst to me, he had then spread paint stripper very thickly all over the path. as i stepped onto the path, groceries in hand, i slipped and fell over. at first i hadn't realized what was happening until i felt the burning and stinging of the paint stripper all over my body. it was all stuck to my bare skin and without even thinking about it, screaming, i ripped off my top and was running and screaming like a lunatic in circles around the garden. maybe he was more cunning than i gave him credit for.

sherman would take his mom's brand new caddy,  load his filthy, really stinky dogs in, and head up to hollywood and beverly hills and go digging through peoples trash. we would sort of laugh about it, but sometimes he would come back with some amazing stuff. cool clothes, pictures, paintings and bric a brac plus a lot of total crap as well. he seemed to have an eye for some stuff though. i had my fair share of pickings.

all his homeless friends somehow had a built-in radar and would arrive to help him unload his findings into the garages. we would come home to a convoy of shopping carts lined up in the alley. then about half an hour into unloading, the rights of ownership and bickering would begin. the amount of fights that broke out that needed police involvement was spectacular. it was pretty much the same scenario every time. we could hear raised voices and then things getting progressively more aggressive and before long sherman would be screaming "mother! MOTHER! call the police! CALL THE POLICE...THIEF!!!"

shortly afterward, jill, ace and i, would hear hushed authoritative tones in the backyard. we'd peer down through the blinds and see the cops, flashlights in hand scoping out the scenario. i can remember once when they shouted up to us " hey, can you guys come out here a minute?" we went out, told them our standard "we know nothing" and then i noticed the the look on the face of one of the cops... pure  shock/horror. slightly pale and shaken he asked me, "have you been in his place?" i said, "yeah". he asked again, "No, i mean, have you actually been IN his place?!" the only thing i could think of that was freaking him out a bit was something that i guess had just become totally normal for me to see.

amongst all the other late night, meth-fueled hobbies sherman had, was his love for artistic collage. the walls of his place were wall to wall pages from porn magazines interspersed here and there with pictures from fashion magazines, a sprinkling of the odd bruce springsteen or other musicians, maybe a little plant life thrown in, but mostly, they were serious porn. i think the cops thought they were venturing into some "silence of the lambs" den of depravity.

his mom was used to it. she would go in and out of there and not bat an eye. i think we just didn't see it anymore. i remember once when his mom was away and i needed to pay the rent. i went to her apt. which was in front of us in the four- plex, and he was inside. i can't remember why i needed to walk by the bathroom, but when i did, i noticed that on the back of the toilet tank, was a picture straight out of hustler. a woman naked, legs akimbo, in a frame no less.

it didn't take long for us to realize sherman WAS actually trying to write a book. it was some sort of sci-fi thing. and most of the time, if we engaged in any sort of conversation with him, we would get sucked into the void to play audience to the latest 30 or so pages he had written. needless to say, we tried to time our comings and goings with precision. but, the few times ace or dominic had been cornered and listened to a chapter, they would say it was actually pretty good.

i on the other hand, would just glaze over while he read about "woofers" and whatever the other aliens were called and the insane names everything had and the song he sang which went something like,"i'm all the way up and i'm not coming down, how about you do you want to play around? it's a wonderful day staying inside listening to this strawberry jiiiivvveeeee.... i'm a hedonstic wicky wicky wicky machineeeeee"! it was all so clearly the amped-up ravings of a speed freak.

even though the paint fumes were killing us, the junkies were keeping us awake and our electric fuses were constantly blown because one of his crazy friends we nicknamed "maverick", parked his gigantic camper van in the alley and plugged it into our electrics for weeks on end, i had this soft spot for sherman. he would aggravate the crap out of me, but sometimes, i would look in his eyes and wonder how long he's been messed up. i could see there was a nice person in there, who i think really meant well. he had a warm, goofy smile. sometimes he would say something so poignant with this little sparkle in his eye and it would really touch me.

sherman and maverick

i'm sure his mom had something to do with his addictions and madness. she seemed sort of passive aggressive... controlling. she would chastise him like a child for bringing home all of the crap in her car, shirk her shoulders, embarrassed that we were witnessing his "vagrant" behaviour. but, at the same time, be picking things out to take in the house for herself. once, while i stood there staring at his haul, there were these ancient packets of spices and baking sprinkles. i could see the contents moving, full of bull weevils, and they'd just been dug out of the trash, but she came in and said in her slightly nasally tone, "jill likes baking, why don't you give these to her?!" mmmm... thanks mrs. lieberman, because our baking stuff just doesn't have enough bull weevils in it.

one day sherman and one of his friends had one of their disagreements. jill and i came home to hear that sherman had been taken to the hospital after he was struck in the head with a brick. it was easter and i don't know why, but i felt really bad for him, so i don't know what possessed me, but i thought we should go see him in the hospital. we piled into my datsun with a basket of easter eggs and went up to cedars sinai.  that day, things got a little more interesting...
part 2 comin' up....