Lost Then Gone (part 1)

Ricardo (Richard Ludt) 2000

Ricardo (Richard Ludt) about 1992

Ricardo (Richard) Ludt and me in about 1995

On the morning of Monday October 10th, 2011 at about 8:12 am. my dear friend Ricardo pulled over in his car and jumped off the north side of the Fremont bridge, "without hesitation"as was quoted by a witness in the brief news report. He was the 55th person to jump from a bridge in Portland, Oregon this year.  I have been meaning to write something about mental illness and suicide for a long time as both have interrupted my life on several occasions. Ricardo is the 4th friend I have lost to suicide. It stuns me as I sit here- this is what has pushed me to finally sit down and write, it is a huge interruption that needs to be attended to. I will start by talking about the 3 friends I have lost and then return to Ricardo.
                                                            

PHILLIP

Me and Phillip about 1989

I lost my friend Phillip in 1990. He was 27 years old. Phillip and I were brought together via our friend Michael.  Michael has been my friend since 1982 and is still very much present in my life. He is also a friend of Ricardo's.
Phillip was very gentle and beautiful and smart. He was not being treated for mental illness but it is safe to say that he was clinically depressed or likely bi-polar. Phillip was drinking a lot, so alcohol was perhaps his chosen medicine. Phillip was living in San Francisco when he died. Michael and I were up here in the Northwest. Phillip went to a B52 concert with some friends and left in the middle of the show. He was discovered dead in his apartment from an overdose several days later.

                                                                  

                                                                          

                                                                             CELESTE

Celeste about 1987

Celeste about 1987

Me and Celeste 1982

In 1993 I lost my friend Celeste. She was 32 years old. Celeste, along with six other girls, formed my group of closest friends. Some of us were pals from various grade schools eventually becoming a very tight click by age 14. During those high school years we spent a lot of time together - much of it partying and getting into and out of trouble. As we grew into our early adulthood it became apparent that certain of us were more troubled then others. Celeste was a seemingly strong person. She was the oldest of the girls, a grade ahead of us and she went to a different high-school. Her family was wealthy and she was spoiled with material things. She drove us around in a big, emerald green car with "2112" license plates in tribute to her favorite band, Rush. We were all reading and re-reading The Trilogy of The Rings by JRR Tolkien. Cleste adored those books. She had a very infectious laugh and the most incredible eyes. They were green and blue and one of them had flecks of amber. She was emphatic when she spoke - gesturing a lot with her hands and shaking her head, tossing her hair. She drank a lot. Her joy was extreme and her anger was intense. She was smart and bright and never came close to using any of her gifts.  Celeste was most certainly an alcoholic and suffering from depression or Bi polar disorder which was never addressed or treated. It has been said that she quit drinking a year before her death but it is impossible to know if that is true. One night in 1993 she asphyxiated herself in her car in her garage. Apparently she told a friend (who I will refer to as A) via the telephone that she was going to do it. Later a message was found on Celeste's telephone answering machine from A telling Celeste goodbye.

                                                             

                                                                                SUSAN 

Susan 1990

Susan and me 1988

Amy and Susan 1990

In the late summer of 1998 I got the news that my friend Susan killed herself exactly the same way as Celeste did. She was the second person from my above described group of friends to commit suicide in the same town. She was living in Pueblo, CO. while the rest of us were scattered throughout the country. We all gathered in Pueblo for her funeral and spent a lot of time with her family. One day we sat around the table with various sisters and brothers (Sue came from a large Catholic family). We spent hours piecing the puzzle together. Sue had lived in several different States in the last few years of her life. She settled in Portland for a while and that is when I became aware of how sick she was. Sue was an alcoholic and also used cocaine and I'm not sure what else. I feel sure she was Bi polar. For a short time - less than 2 months-she took medication for depression but that is as far as her treatment went. Sue would go on a wild tear quite frequently. Her acting out emotionally was very intense. There is a lot of mystery surrounding what happened and when, but apparently she was raped, she was jailed, she broke her back falling out of a window. Sue did go to Alcoholics anonymous for a time. She met someone there whom she had a child with. She adored her boy but  was too sick to take care of him and so he was taken away from her when he was a toddler and adopted by his foster parents. Susan very randomly married an acquaintance from grade school  shortly after losing her son. Approximately 6 weeks later she killed herself.

Susan was gorgeous. She was smart and funny and could be the biggest goof. In retrospect I can see that  there were signs of her disturbance very early on, but when you are a kid yourself there is no way to see mental illness for what it really is. Her quirks and moods developed into a storm of sickness as time went on. There were times as a teenager when Sue would display very strange emotional behavior alternately ecstatic and despairing. Despite this she got through High School with a respectable GPA and was even a cheer leader until she got kicked off the squad. She escaped  her home town, went to college in Northern Colorado, and later lived in various places on the West Coast. Sue continued her education and became a respiratory therapist. There were times when she seemed very together and functional and she was a very good and solid friend to me. The thing about depression and bi polar disorder is that it is sometimes invisible to the observer. At times all that is evident on the outside seems perfectly normal and even very positive. The loss of Sue was devastating. I dealt with feelings of guilt for years. I distanced myself from her. I just could not help her and she was very hard to be around. At the time I was dealing with my own depression which I would only later come to terms with. But a part of me swore that I would never let this happen again, never let someone I love slip away like that. I would never pull away from someone just because it felt really uncomfortable to be around them because the drama was too big a burden to bear. Self-preservation - whatever you want to call it. I thought of my retreat as selfish and cold. And in the last eight months this thought has been on my mind a lot - this can't happen again.

                                                                    RICARDO

This is Ricardo around the time I met him - 1982

This is the only picture I can find of  Ricardo that I took when I knew him in Colorado. He is in the middle on the steps to the apt I shared with our mutual friend Jason (standing behind Ricardo)

Ricardo at my wedding 2000

I met Ricardo in 1982 in Colorado Springs, CO. at Giuseppe's Italian Restaurant. Ricardo (At that time he went by the name Rick) was a bus boy and I was a waitress . I fell in love with him instantly. He was so beautiful, funny, witty, full of energy - truly delightful to be around. We were friends at first sight. I also had a crush on him. At that time he was bisexual so I figured - you never know. I got a job at a better restaurant called Jose Muldoon's close to my 21st birthday and Rick followed shortly after. We became friends with the above mentioned Michael as well as Jason who also worked at Jose Muldoons. The 3 of us were all enamored of Rick and I have to admit their was some jealousy. In the above photo of him by the pool looking like a movie star you can, I am sure, understand the attraction. But it was his heart, not his looks that held me. We became very close very quickly as people do when they are so young . My memories of Rick from that time are all pretty joyous. We worked together, we played together, we were beginning to grow into adults together. There was drinking and dancing - there were raids on my make-up and my wardrobe (unbeknownst to me until after the fact)  for a drag adventure that he and Jason went on in Denver. We danced to new wave music at "the Annex", a Colorado Springs underground club frequented by young gays and straights who loved to dress up and party at the cutting edge of what was hip in our little land locked city. At the time Rick was dating a beautiful blond, blue-eyed boy named Steve. Michael, Jason, and I thought they were the most beautiful couple in the world.
                                 From here my memory fails me when it comes to the order of events. Michael, Jason and I planned to escape Colorado and finally settled on Portland, Oregon as our destination for College and a new life. Rick's parents bought him a ticket to Europe. He traveled through the UK, Germany, France, and finally ended up in Spain where he fell in love with Jose Manuel. He became fluent in Spanish and had dreams of opening a bar with Jose Manuel in Malaga. In Spain he acquired the name Ricardo given to him by his boyfriend. For some reason he returned and then spent time with his Grandmother Stella in San Diego. At some point he moved to Sacramento. In the meantime we kept in touch and he came up and visited us briefly in Portland in 1985 on his way to a meditation retreat in Washington.
In 1990 after graduating from art school I moved to the Bay area in hopes of continuing a romantic relationship with my boyfriend. Riccardo and I would see each other now and again now that we lived in close proximity. This is when I met Jose Manuel on a visit to see Ricardo in Sacramento. He seemed very much in love with Ricardo and they had plans to live together again in Spain. A lot happened in the year I lived in the SF area. I had 5 different jobs and lived n 4 places -Palo Alto, Menlo Park, San Mateo, and San Francisco. Things were very rocky in my relationship with my boyfriend. Ricardo was my rock. One of my most treasured memories is of riding on the back of his Triumph motor cycle from Sacramento to San Francisco one night. I remember at first being nervous on the bike. I had my arms around Ricardo's waist and I could smell the amber he always wore. I felt safe and free.

Jose Manuel and Ricardo during Jose's visit to Sacramento, 1990

Ricardo and me hiking Mount Tamalpais north of SF near Mill Valley, 1990

One day Ricardo got a heart breaking letter from Jose Manuel . He had met someone else and so discouraged Ricardo from returning to Spain - but Ricardo was determined. I tried to talk him out of it. I knew it would be a bad situation. He went anyway, shipping his motor bike and all his worldly good with him. I remember the two of us walking through the Mission on a sunny day and saying goodbye. He was off to try and retrieve a dead relationship with Jose Manuel and I was returning to Portland after suffering the ending of my own relationship. We kept in touch via letters (no cell phone or email for us then). Things went from bad to worse for Ricardo during this stint in Spain. There was turmoil between him, Jose Manuel and the new boyfriend, Francisco, someone broke into his room, stole all his jewelry, his jeans and his money, someone set fire to his motorbike and finally he slipped a disc in his back. I had been writing him imploring him to return to the States and in particular - to join me in Portland. I spoke to his mother and she arranged to get him back to Colorado. He had surgery on his back, got a truck and drove to Portland. I think this was in 1992. We lived together in my apartment for about 6 weeks until another apartment opened up in the building. Ricardo got a job at Cafe Mingo and immediately started amassing his many friends and acquaintances. He was always so socially comfortable and very much the life of the party. He was still very enamored of the Spanish culture and dived into Flamenco lessons. He met and fell in love with Thomas Lauderdale who ended up moving into Ricardo's apartment. Those were very happy times. Ricardo got more and more into performing and took up belly dancing. He also began to sing some of the standards that were sung by his English Pop Star father  Dickie Pride back in the 1950's/early 60's such as "Anything Goes" accompanied by Thomas on piano. Ricardo bore a striking resemblance to his father. Here is a photo of him with his father's album in the background : Ricardo and his Dad. Ricardo's father suffered from mental illness - quite possibly Bi Polar disorder and was lobotomized in 1969 when Ricardo was 4 years old. shortly after he died of a possible overdose of sleeping pills.

Ricardo was a mainstay in my life for many years, like a selected family member.  He was supportive to me throughout my ups and downs. He could make me laugh like no other. He could take on so many voices and characters and be so entertaining. He could be so goofy and free. At the best of times Ricardo seemed to know himself so well - be so comfortable with who he was. At other times he was searching so intensely for who he thought he was supposed to be. The loss of his biological father at such a tender age left him with a big hole I believe. When Ricardo's 28th birthday was approaching I remember he was so caught up with the realization  that he was about to surpass the number of years his father had lived. Ricardo remained a citizen of the UK despite that fact that he had spent most of his life in the U.S. - he was an alien. He did not have a birth certificate as the Weir Maternity Hospital in London,  where he was born closed so he didn't know the exact time of his birth. We used to talk about this because it meant he could not get an accurate astrology chart done. The above combination of facts always seemed very significant to me. Ricardo was always searching and jumping with great passion between various ways of being and expressing himself as I mentioned before. He seemed to have found his calling becoming a massage therapist in 1998. He was very good. He was a healer. He became very involved in various types of spiritual endeavors and for a time was  active with a group that practiced Lakota Indian Spirituality.

Ricardo as Satyr for the Capricorn Cabaret by Kitty Diggins (1995?)

Ricardo as Satyr about 1995

Ricardo, Krista and Jay about 1999 ?

 

 

 

 

Susan, Todd, me Ricardo as a Witch Doctor (Halloween 1999?) Ricardo had no underwear on under his grass skirt :)

( I just spent the last several hours finishing this and I just lost it all so I am going to stop now and continue this in a second part later).