Rolf Robert Horst

When I first met Rolf, his story I found intriguing, fascinating, worthy of a book, and so here are the first early pages with more to follow.

Biography of an Unknown He

I do not know his name yet. He appeared one day, shortly before my father passed away. I was walking home, bringing bananas back from the local farm stand, and I noted as I passed the hardware store that he sat there, in a white parked car next to the sidewalk. I remembered that face. I had seen him more recently at an art opening and he appeared an interesting face in the crowd. A momentary flicker, a smile at the thought, and I kept walking. Just as I turned onto my street, crossing a parking lot, he pulled up next to me, the white knight in his older audi quattro. He unrolled the window, stuck his head out, and said, I do not normally do this, but would you like to take a ride?. It took no more than a second of turning off the voices, you know which ones, and I leapt into the passenger seat. I saw you at my opening, my house is a couple of doors down, would you like to see my work, not really like looking at my etchings, seemed a good starting point, He wanted to see it all, His background, very much aligned with mine, a well known artist studio assistant for sixteen years, he had made the pieces that now hung in museums around the world, and in the collections of the well to do. He had traveled in place of the artist to many countries and taught classes. He was asked to speak on the work. He was the unknown hand of the artist at work, never taking credit although the work was his. Easily recognizable, a long life lived here in the Catskills, that did not start here but started here early enough.

No it really all starts back in Germany, after the war, the second World War, as if the first was not enough. A country left as a pile of rubble, a country punished severely, and although his heritage was half gypsy, still your family was held to the same severe (to do without) as those that supported that monster. But wait a moment. Who here was the real criminal. What voices after the first world war subjected the German people to such austere measures that sunk them into such a dire situation, that they were willing to listen to such a person, and follow him without questioning. What country provided the machines for war and then ultimately pretended near the end of the war that they were the heroes coming in to save the world. But that is another tale saved for a rainy day.

Thunderstorms. Mr Stella, red shirt unbuttoned, the windows open, he standing there bare chested to the crashing thunder, the lightening, flashes cutting the sky, setting it ablaze. Our young child barely out of the crib, terrorized watching Mr. Stella with awe, a god facing the storm fearless, courageous. Our young boy remembers the family under the table at such times, a duck and cover exercise, as if a mere table could protect one from the intent of the storm, or from bombs for that matter, Especially nuclear ones, supposedly making the world a safer place. For who? Later, probably in America, the family took cover in the car. All seven of them plus parents and grandmother. Luckily cars were built solidly then, steel framed and large enough to hunker down in, body to body, a pile of them, fogging the windows with all the breathing going on inside. The rubber wheels insured the safety of every man, woman, and child within. There was certainly some truth to all this. After all, he is still with us.

So back to the boy. His start was in the rubble, born two years after the war, a country, a city, a playground for children with dreams, three castles, bombed, but enough still standing to run about in with dungeons below. One building stored molasses, the containers broken, the children bathing in the molasses, rolling in the sticky stuff, He had a brother of another father, a product of rape. Slow to learn, his older sibling had difficulty dressing himself, and so this younger brother, watched over him with love and helped him find his way into life. Few livelihoods existed, a world so destroyed and shattered takes a long time to settle back into a recognizable place so one created a life where one could. A mother with children, mouths to feed had to provide how she could. American GIs were there with the money and chocolate. Prostitution employed the female community and children were submitted to the trauma of it. At nights he still thrashes in his sleep and cries out. If a woman was lucky enough to marry a GI, she and her children, two only, could come to the states on army transport. So his mother nearly married his father but in the Madam Butterfly twist, he went home and married the high school sweetheart instead. Then along came what was to be his stepfather, a man named Marty, who had a story of his own. At an early age, he contracted rheumatic fever, and was told that his life would not be long lived. So now, here, he was nineteen, in the US military in Germany, and Matliss was twenty nine with by now four children. She had another two younger babies by a GI that married her, beat her, abused them, and then ultimately returned to the states unwanted at any cost. To Marty, Matliss was perfect. She had the readymade family, and she was, I am stretching here, a fun loving, life giving, solid woman of a certain beauty that appealed to him and must have continued to do so for they stayed together for the rest of their lives and had another three children. Due to medical advances, Martys heart which would have had an early expiration date, had a new valve put in, a medical tuneup as we like to say, and he was good to go for another forty years.

They married. He looking so handsome in his uniform and Matliss, in a white cloud of tulle, their wedding photo set against the backdrop of a bombed out building. The town disheveled, but these two in that white light moment aspiring to a different future, a different life in a new cleaner, fresher place. So the two babies were brought with them while the two older brothers, were left behind, and he, our reason for this writing, was given a sturdy, rather special scooter with all the very best upgrades as a distraction, they must have hoped he would not notice that they were leaving without him. But his grandmother was there for the boys, and she was also an extraordinary woman. Born into an upper middle class german family, she married a gypsy, and was excommunicated. The little I know of her life, she served as a nurse in the first World War, and her husband, right before the second world war, knowing how his family would be affected by his ethnic background, hung himself. So now she was the caretaker for the boys. He suffered from the deprivations, many children did, and most likely had tuberculosis for he was sent to the Black forest, to a sanitorium where he stood for six weeks with other children in their underwear with darkly tinted glasses in front of ultraviolet lights. He was hungry much of the time but his grandmother had managed to make a connection with black market coffee which she sold to support them. That hunger left its mark and the truth is, he does not experience hunger to this day.

What happens when life is upside down, when you are just the smallest kid fording the stream, trying to keep up with the bigger kids. The boy went under, caught by the current, he could not swim. He drowned and was found far downstream and pulled out. Yes, he saw the white light, although he would be hard pressed to say that was what it was. Something much more than that, More a feeling of being very calm, enveloped, safe. so when he was rudely awakened, he felt angry at the men who brought him back, the pounding on his chest hurt fiercely. He was angry for a very long time. And it was not a good year. Things happened. Some drunken GI drove his Buick up onto the sidewalk and next thing this young fledgling knew he was under the car, between the wheels, looking up at the oil pan. Bad as it seemed, certainly better, miracle of miracles, the wheels missed him entirely, his relationship with cars, as you will see continuing to be an intimate experience.

But first there was the dare, Hey kid, how about you jump off the roof into that pile of dirt and I will give you five marks. Our entrepreneurial young daredevil dove head first, won the five marks, but for some time after walked around with his neck stuck low down into his collarbone, his head perched on an unbending pole. It is amazing he lived to tell his tale.

Then the day came two years later when the three, grandmother with the two boys boarded the ship and for two weeks experienced a vast new world of water and sky. Marty and his mother with another baby and his siblings were waiting in New York to take them on the long drive upstate. You can imagine, a young German boy from another world arriving , those first weeks, that first year, as he struggled to be part of a family he hardly knew. At that age two years is a huge hole in a life, and the security in knowing ones family could only have been something that exists for other children. The family had moved on. They insisted his name should now be American, Bobby Loppiano, but he stood steadfast and held on to the one fragment from his life that was to stick with him, his identity. His stepfather, to his credit, now twenty-one had adopted a family and taken on the role as provider. He acquired a book from the Army Corp of Engineers on how to build a house and put our young man to work alongside him, building the five bedroom house for the family of nine plus the grandmother. He learned so much; how to build a foundation, dig a well, put in septic, electric, and plumbing. all lessons that have served him well, although at the time and for long after he felt singled out to the hard task of being a man at the young age of ten. Indeed it was hard labor, but it is that experience which has informed so much of what has happened to and for him since.

Wait. Just a moment. Back up to the septic. Marty, always thinking on both feet. How would you get a septic dug without personally picking up a shovel and with so many boys in the family of just the right age. Of course. Boys, how would you like to make a fort in the ground here? As big as you want and with tunnels branching out. And what a fort they dug! Four of them at the time, the other two too young and Rosie did not count, she was a girl. They had about a week to play in it, before Marty pulled the plug. OK All of you out. There it was. Beautiful.

The day arrived for the building inspector to inspect. Quite a different standard in those days, not exactly sure what the inspection consisted of. There was just one slight, hardly worth mentioning, detail that most houses consider necessary, particularly to a family of ten. Water. So how did Marty pass inspection? In his own creative way, he connected a hose from the outdoor pump to a faucet he installed in the kitchen. At an agreed upon sign, the child outside, was to pump for all he was worth. so the water would flow to the inspectors satisfaction. I guess it worked.

For years Marty kept the exterior of the house wrapped in tar paper with the scaffolding erected so the house, should the assessor show up, would always appear in progress.

And what was it like then, so different today. He took the school bus, and as he lived furthest away, his early memory was of the bus driver stopping to swing the bus door wide and with a six shooter fire at the squirrels. A young boy with the sharp sound reverberating throughout the bus looked up without surprise. Of course. This was America, cowboys and Indians. Of course now we know better. But to him, a child of Europe, America was still a vast wild frontier. His teacher would read to the pupils for the first hour because she knew the children, most of them coming from their farm chores, milking cows, were up at four am, and with sleep still hovering over the eyelids could hardly manage to keep eyes open, much less pay attention.

Matliss learned to drive, the independence, freedom to race the engine, and hug the curves of the road, She was fearless and fast in what could be a lethal combination. Their neighbor, an elderly man prone to blackouts still drove, and the day came when they intersected. The boy went through the windshield, as I mentioned before more intimate experience, As Matliss and her friend scooped him off the asphalt, the wife of the man followed pleading, Please do not tell, he passes out, he will lose his license. The boy survived. And then it happened again. Matliss behind the wheel waving, her attention on the friends watching as she veered away from the phone pole, up the embankment across the street, and ultimately into a tree. Once again the kid through the windshield and his mother screaming, oh no, Marty is going to kill me. Almost forgotten, the boy lay there half conscious. Again he survived.

Within a few years he was driving, no license, no car registration. At fourteen the boys were taking the 56 chevy in the winter down to the water front in Kingston, a drive straight down the road and onto the ice then a wide sliding turn into the Rondout. If one missed, and they did, the cars would careen out beyond the ice into the water and straight down to the bottom. There was that one time when he happened to be driving, missed the curve, a swing too wide and with door open, managed to throw himself out onto the ice in time as the car continued to ice sail and then sink into the Hudson River.

Never one to spend long hours on homework, the learning came easily to him, and his stepfather probably from the relationship that developed while building together, spent long hours talking with this teenager, covering the spectrum, conversations on history, politics, life, He learned to listen, to take in and retain all the valuable information, to make it his own. He learned so much and later as a teenager he taught Marty a few things. For Christmas one year, he brought home pot and Frank Zappa. Marty grew his hair long, he had Matliss grow pot in the backyard. He stopped listening to Perry Como and talking politics with her in the evenings. One day that all changed. The bottle of chianti was back on the table, she wanted the evening as it had been, she wanted to be able to say at least one more time, what America needs, is a good bombing, the pot plants pulled out by the roots lay on the table as proof things had changed. But Marty was not one to sit back for long. His mother was Cherokee and like Matliss they were children that had learned to question authority. He worked for IBM, a mind numbing job, sitting in front of a screen and for each number he saw, he had to press the button day after day, week after week, and unfortunately year after year until one day he noted that in the bylaws of the company, they could not fire an employee without just cause. So he determined to push management to the brink. He grew long hair, he stopped practicing good hygiene, he arrived in late, and for quite a long time they accepted his new look and behavior. When the day finally arrived that they had to fire him, it was only on the condition they gave him a good settlement, good enough that he was able to buy a gas station with small general store.

By now our young man, eager for experience and we know what kind, was trying desperately to attract the attention of girls. Thinking about sex and the possibility of getting some, took extensive planning and preparation, Mostly not successful but at some point as is bound to happen, he found himself in the closet, in the dark, feeling, touching, experiencing a certain moment of ecstasy that made it a desirable goal whenever possible. He took to running miles over hills and down into valleys, he joined the track team and became the second best cross country man and had a girlfriend but she was not giving him any.

Picking beans for 75 cents an hour in the summers, while the kids of Kerhonkson worked the hotels, this was after all the jewish alps, camps, escape from the stifling heat of the city during the summer, mothers and children, fathers returning on the weekends, jobs to contend with during the week. So those teenagers, the ones further down the road, made money, good money, enough to buy cool cars, enough to attract the girls. They were getting some.

He made it through high school, hard to fathom as he never ever did homework. But his grades stood proof that he well understood the material. He had no money for college but was drawn to the New Paltz scene and lived there for many years, hanging out with teachers and students, and others like himself that were attracted, fireflies to the light. At some point he was introduced to heroin by a friend. He was seventeen, and what is cheap to start is costly to continue. And interestingly, people go into the hospital, have surgery, are prescribed opiates and never become addicted. At least that is what the studies have found. But those people that have experienced trauma, it changes their chemistry, and heroin makes them feel normal. But its a full time job to exist, driving the car four hours a day or more from New Paltz to the city and back. Foraging for drugs in areas of the city where at that time, surviving dangerous situations in bad neighborhoods, one had to be reckless, fearless, driven by a need. And where was all this heroin coming from. back from Vietnam on army transport with the returning soldiers. The government always standing strong, with moral rectitude from the rectum, made laws to prevent drug addicts from getting together, even if that purpose was to support other addicts in recovery, after all, there is a lot of money to be made running drugs, and they were getting their share of the business. And with the expansion of the prison system and three strikes law during the Clinton administration, well it seems they were making money from it hand over fist, all ways. But here again, I have digressed.

I know little of the Cynthia years although they lasted a good twenty. He loved everything about her and helped to raise her two daughters. He loved their family. She was a craftsperson, a printer, and he could sew, tailor even. They made pillows, and he being so slight of build had found it necessary to hem, adjust, shorten cuffs draw in shoulders, and sewing pillows seemed a natural contribution to their collaboration. So what happened. During this time he was working for the artist as studio assistant, traveling outside the country quite a bit. He wanted a child, she already had her two and was uninterested in the s word and became instead an ex. He waited, he hoped, he put in his time. Ultimately he had an affair on the other side of the world, a woman, an artist, who missed his boots under her bed when he left to return to Cynthia whom he still loved. But she found out and that was the end of it. He had to leave. By this time he was clean, had managed to stop using but when he met Kirsten and she was twenty years younger and ready to give him a child, he was happy beyond all knowing, determined to look after her. She was addicted to heroin. He thought he was strong enough and could not possibly, knowing all that he knew, want to go back to it. But he did. I am not sure what he gained from the experience, seems he lost so much. His job with the artist, drawings given to him not only by that artist but others well known, his home, and mostly anything else that had a dollars and sense value. It was at this time that he met his father, and this is one of those revelatory moments in life when the sharp light of recognition goes on and you understand something of yourself. His father was in recovery from alcohol. His oldest stepsister was a recovering heroin addict, his stepbrother also had a drug of choice not known at the time, but probably the reason for the falling out of father and son. Environmental, genetic. You figure it out. On the second meeting he brought his new wife along, Kirsten ready to pop, her water broke, and Roman was born.

Roman was tiny. Born premature he was only one pound eight ounces, just a baby bird in size, with mouth ready to consume life in vast quantities. But the state stepped in. Because of Kirstens past, even though she had been clean throughout the pregnancy, they took this small sampling of life, just a laboratory experiment as far as they were concerned. a social worker sure of her authority, a court determined to punish, was anyone concerned about the baby other than the mother and our now father? They had a terrible time of it. They fell back into heroin to relieve the pain. Roman grew, they saw him once a week, in a room with no windows, just a desk and one chair, it must have been so painful. Roman, now three, found a tie at a garage sale and who knows why, but a fascination with ties seized him. He collected them, wore them every day to school and still wears them when the occasion calls for special dress. Now when I say special, it may not mean what you think it does. a one time maritime academy student, his uniform still hangs in the closet, and at art functions, he appears dressed in the broad shouldered jacket with tapering waist, a white tuxedo shirt, and a gold colored bow tie. The boy can dress! I do not know the whole story, there is still much to hear and learn. I do know, like his father, he is well loved by a community, family and friends, like his father, they have patiently and lovingly taught him skills that have made him exceptional, brilliant, astute, thoughtful, a life made so much more by the love that wrapped around him, a community that cared. today he oversees a large performing art space and a building, once a school, now in the midst of renovation, he teaches sailing on the hudson, acts as a chef when his friends do their popup restaurant, he is a woodworker, and has helped his friend, Sam prepare his steel hulled sixty foot sloop, for the water. Now there is a story. Sam bought the boat in Maine. The man who owned it had planned on retiring aboard the boat so he had it waiting in his back yard. Of course that was forty years ago, a rural location. Now retired, he has had time to lift his head and see that while his head was down, working hard, he had missed noticing that a community had grown up around him and the boat no longer could be launched right out the back yard gate. So it was suspiciously cheap when Sam noted the ad. He and Roman made the drive four hours away, and found that extricating the sloop from its permanent berth, tied to the tree, a yard full of tall grass, was going to be a challenging proposition but if there was one thing they could both agree on, it was possible and they were determined. The two sailed it from Maine, down to Hells Kitchen, where the East river and the Long Island Sound go into the Hudson, a ferociously often treacherous, clashing of rivers and tides that test ones abilities and the seaworthiness of the sloop. The two embraced the adventure, plied the waters of the Hudson River to Connolly where they put the boat into dry dock to work on, repair, and prepare running produce from the Hudson Valley to the city. Roman, a twenty three year old with flow.

He knew it was coming, and wished for it. He had already had his teeth knocked out, replaced with a set of dentures bearing his inscribed name, just in case he lost them or they were needed for identifying purposes. I wonder if the stars and the wealthy have their perfect mouths inscribed. Sooner or later, one either overdoses or goes to jail, neither particularly gratifying options, and always looking over the shoulder was exhausting, relentless. he just did not want to think about it any more. And then it happened. In the Rondout parking lot in Kingston. He was surrounded by cops who strip searched him, there in full view of passers by. Standing there in his underwear, relieved that it had finally happened.But there was nothing and they had to let him go. Six months later while living out of his car, a car that told its own tale of distress, the cop passed him, scanned the license after seeing outdated registration on the windshield, swung his car back around, and pulled our man over. Three hours of questioning and search came up with nothing so finally, when the cop wanted to strip search him, at 98 pounds he was no picture of health, and the heroin he was hiding in his sweater sleeve, became enough of a liability, he surrendered rather than be naked. But something happened. The cop put the decimal in the wrong place and the amount of what he had, which was considerable, enough for a felony, was written to be a misdemeanor and rather than a five year sentence it was three to six months and he was out in three. Rehab certainly the best option as if he had gotten the get out of jail free card and salvation was at hand. Well not exactly but it is a good scam that actually helps others but mostly some religious nonprofit that makes billions on your used clothing, furniture, and appliances and sends missionaries to Africa. Most of the employees, and I use this term loosely, work the full work week and get paid seven dollars plus room and board. He mostly drove the truck with another guy, picking up the unwanted detritus, often calls to pick up washers and dryers, rusted from sitting out on the back porch, had not been used in twenty-five years, the sagging sofa bed on the second floor so heavy, the owners just wanted the item removed for free. And there were always the people that wanted to talk to them confessionally. They were Christians after all, were they not? And the stuff that came through the donations. One man drove up in a new mercedes benz one day, handed over the keys to the intake person, and walked away. The employees combing the piles of clothing would find gold, silver, sometimes thousands of dollars in say, a shoe. Obviously grandpa or Aunt Mildred had died after ferreting away money for years, and the responsible relative would shove all that stuff into big black plastic contractor bags without looking. Oooops.

Our man spent three years, a time out, as he saw it, a good dry cleaning. He joined NA, narcotics anonymous, it had the advantage of being all inclusive unlike the other well known alternative, and one only had to have the desire to stop, to change ones life, even if only for one day, with support groups everywhere. Did you know that these groups were at one time illegal in this country. Now that is an interesting fact. He lived in Albany NY for the subsequent two years, met a woman, a therapist, her name was Susan, it did not work out. I only mention this as it brings us up to that day, the day where the book starts out, and as my name was Susan, and his other relationship did not end well, I changed to my middle name so as not to confuse the issue.

Love. Certainly that leap into the car changed everything. A moment so perfect when worlds collide and merge before one is quite aware of it. That day, we went to Opus4o. Perhaps you know of the place but I did not. His friend, Tad Richards, the stepson of Harvey Fyte, a sculptor, who in the 1920s, purchased a piece of land here in the Catskills that had a quarry on it, Tad inherited it, not simply the gift of a generous nature but the metronome of responsibility keeping time, a life regulated, not governed by whim, but by schedules, events, maintenance. These quarries which exist throughout the Catskills, provided much of the bluestone for building nyc, then later abandoned, now mostly they leave overgrown incisions into the land. Remind me later, stone, so much a part of the landscape, tamed, walls thousands of miles of them covering the northeast, enough to wrap the backside of the moon. Another digression, fascinating, I will pick up the thread a bit later, but at the moment back to Harvey. He piled, stacked, an obsession that lasted forty years. He lifted the stone, built canyons, stairways, a large performance area. One mans vision, an architectural wonder, Then onto more stone, another mans vision. Bob Schuler, a sculptor, at one time a teacher, until he inherited a substantial sum from an uncle, enough to fund his dream, and quit the day job. We arrived at the singular curiosity he and Nora call home. Basically, Bob took a large helium balloon, blew it up, sprayed it over with two part urethane foam, took a chain saw cutting windows and doors,added a smaller balloon to the side, covered it with foam, and stood back to admire his cost effective answer to fine home building. And what was Bob doing now. A project so romantic as to capture the imagination. Large granite cubes, each with a theme pertaining to life, our culture on this planet. Each cube has the design engraved into the stone by sandblasting, thousands of stones, a studio piled high, colorful, quirky fascinating, each one a distinct story to tell, Bob has drawn a line around the planet, through the oceans, and when he has enough blocks ready, a ship is hired and loaded, then taken out to the particular locations, the longitude and latitude marked on one side of each cube. There it is dropped, four hundred pounds plummeting to the ocean floor where no hiccup will lift it back up ever. Why does Bob do this? Some day long after we have all left this place, something, someone? may find one of these blocks and wonder. It is his own radio signal into space. He wears large thickly rimmed black glasses. Perhaps they allow him to see far beyond our world and into the next. Perhaps he is making contact already.

THERE IS MORE TO COME