Whilst scouting in Hudson, in upstate New York, a friend and I stopped into the local diner, to ease our hangovers and accept this was not our day and head back to the city. Then in waltzes Larry, greeting everyone with a royal wave, wearing a grey dress and grinning crookedly beneath a straw hat and balancing on black high heels. Needless to say, everyone in Hudson knew Larry. He’d moved there with his partner in the late eighties ‘back when this town was full of nothing but scag whores, and hooligans’ he told us, then kindly offered to show us his mansion a stone’s throw away on Warren street. Having once achieved notorious success dealing in upholstery and antiques, Larry was now living in squalor. Once a palace, the mansion was now in ruin, baring the scars of adolescent vandalism and break-ins, it was a stagnant mess of old shoes, valuable antiques, hundreds of gowns and dresses, the floors littered with mulberry silks, Italian linens and velvets he’d collected over the years. ‘I came here looking for the American dream,’ he told us,’ and I found a nightmare.’ He hadn’t paid the bank in years and they would soon foreclose and Larry looked to lose everything, including the mansion on which he’d spent so much of his small fortune maintaining. He speaks openly of his illness, and is on constant medication, yet, Larry abides. His perpetual enthusiasm and whimsical storytelling raise the spirit and as he showed us around the many rooms, artifacts and memories of an enchanting life presented themselves. Every chair, beaver felt bowler hat, broken china doll and cutlery set had a story; the cracked 18th century mirrors, and the dozens of urns lining the mantlepiece that contained the ashes of his beloved dead cats (‘my mothers is in there somewhere’ he smiled). He struggled upstairs, stopping for breath as he showed us up to the view from the top room, looking out onto the Catskill mountains. ‘It looks better in the spring.’ The final room he kept especially in memory of his beloved partner Robert Soto, who had ‘drunk himself to death’ after the collapse of their business leaving Larry to maintain the mansion alone, and there he’s remained for the past eight years, ‘the scourge of Hudson’ he chuckled.
I was recently able to track him down through a local landlord, and found him at his new apartment, sat wrapped in fur, clearly diminished in health since our last meeting, enjoying an evening cigarette on the porch. The bank had finally foreclosed, and the mansion was now almost completely empty, and he had taken with him all that he could carry. He didn’t miss all the old junk; the antiques and valuable fabrics,’what would I do with it anyway?’ Yet he told me he had found something invaluable as he was moving out; a small tin car his sister had given him years ago when he was just a boy, ‘the oldest and most precious thing I own.’ We said our farewells and then noticing I was clearly under dressed for the brutal Hudson weather, he put out his cigarette and asked if I’d like to take a coat with me ‘I have just the one for you.’ He struggled back into the house and begin wading through piles of old clothes and linen. A rare breed indeed. Thank you, Larry.
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