The Appollo Project
A long-missing thorn in Rhinebeck’s side reappears ... in an obituary
Today I learned, belatedly, that Ken Appollo, one of the two or three most interesting and tortured souls who have ever crossed my path, is dead. According to his sister’s well-written obituary, he suffered an ignominious demise, subsisting over years in an assisted living facility in Beacon, trapped “in a chemical prison,” and suffering from blurred vision caused by untreated cataracts, among other indignities. He was born June 26, 1948, and died March 1, 2020. We had lost touch.
My long, frequently interrupted friendship with Ken Appollo lasted about 20 years, and was conducted whenever he reappeared in and around my home turf of Rhinebeck or, more specifically, Rhinecliff. Rhinecliff, the Hudson-hugging hamlet that eastbound tourists commonly fail to find upon traversing the geographically misnamed Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, has been enjoying a languid, on-again/off-again renaissance. It has metamorphosed at an almost imperceptible rate over the years, shifting away from its early status as a thriving track-side bedroom community for the servile class that once toiled for the Astor family. Its miniature Victorian-era homes are increasingly populated by refugees from post-9/11 and post-COVID Manhattan and Brooklyn, even during intermittent real-estate meltdowns. The rough-and-tumble old Rhinecliff Hotel, with its sagging beams straining to keep the sketchy upstairs residents from crashing into the hard-partying patrons in the basement bar, has again fallen dormant after having been expensively ($4 million) re-imagined as a pricey destination for Amtrak-hopping weekend visitors from the City, as well as a nice place to have a good meal and a cocktail or two. In the space where a generally friendly, occasionally unruly tenant/bar patron named “Herc” once slept off his all-night benders, fancy newlywed couples could cavort in style in a romantic suite with a Jacuzzi tub, slate shower and sweeping views of the river from the outdoor deck. Until, as with most projects launched with a hefty dose of hubris, bills didn’t get paid and the fancy doors closed once again, at least for now.
Across the street, another beloved restaurant, China Rose, also fell by the wayside, recently replaced by a nice American-themed bistro, Kips Tavern, which seems to be doing well. But as it gentrifies, Rhinecliff is losing some of its scruffy, culturally and socially ecumenical charm. As recently as 1998, the hamlet was a place that sheltered and took care of wounded heroes like Herc. Police visits were not uncommon, as fights from the hotel spilled into the street. Drug and alcohol abuse were the order of the day. There were robbery sprees, terrible fatal blazes, bad accidents, dark tales of inbreeding, even a murder or two. The hotel was under investigation as a potential firetrap, and was on the cusp of being closed down. And sitting as a sort of final cornerstone to the end of that strange, disjointed era, in effect blocking progress into the cleaned-up, family-friendly 21st-century future, was Ken Appollo.
Appollo, who at the time co-owned what is now a staid, red-brick, three-story Federal-style townhouse building on the corner of Kelly and Shatzell streets in the heart of the hamlet, was an antiques dealer, award-winning author and self-described “anarchist.” In the summer of 1998, his lonely one-man jihad against the inevitable gentrification of Rhinecliff was still in full swing. Like an East Coast version of Hunter S. Thompson, terrorizing and baiting his upscale neighbors, Appollo held court in the slogan-festooned house and headquarters he had converted into a “free” zone for himself and anyone else who shared his vision, including teenagers, musicians (including neighbor Natalie Merchant, on whose 1998 record, Ophelia, he is credited with playing an ancient “barrel organ”), “outlaw bikers” and “dirty old hippys” (sic).
Between his staging of free beer parties for whomever showed up, his habit of adorning his house, fence and garage with colorful block-letter screeds celebrating total personal freedom and railing against those with whom he nurtured a grudge, and his penchant for what his onetime downstairs tenant/majordomo, Scott, termed “creating mysteries,” Appollo succeeded in making himself a focus of consternation in the hamlet and beyond, attracting significant attention from local law enforcement in the process. There were reports of Appollo setting brush fires, hurling obscenities at patrons of the China Rose, pulling his pants down to moon visiting tourists. Residents at the time were split in their assessment of the man. Some said he was suffering from mental and/or emotional distress, causing him to behave erratically. A dwindling number of supporters maintained that because his ideology and lifestyle were incompatible with the hamlet’s rising cachet, there was a concerted effort to, as one resident told me, “persecute” him out of town.
The noise was such that, one weekend in July of 1998, I resolved to embark on a fact-finding mission to Rhinecliff, starting with a stakeout of the notorious Appollo residence to attempt gaining an audience with the man himself. Scott, the guardian at the gate, poked his head out of the second-story window as this reporter was taking photographs of the house. “Leave him a note,” said Scott, in response to my request to speak to Appollo. “He said he doesn’t want to be disturbed for a couple of hours.”
Scott presently invited me in and agreed to be interviewed pending Appollo’s availability. An affable, intelligent sort, he spoke highly of his landlord as he sat listening raptly to the music of Tori Amos. “Ken’s a genius,” said Scott, and went about proving his statement by offering for my perusal a copy of Appollo’s 1997 book, “Humble Work and Mad Wanderings: Street Life in the Machine Age.”
The book is a collection of early photographs depicting 19th-century street people plying various trades on both sides of the Atlantic. The photographs, gleaned from Appollo’s extensive collection, are interspersed with his poetic and philosophical interjections that illuminate the ages-old plight of the street person. It is a witty, intelligent and disturbing piece of literature, which before it went out of print garnered national praise in the form of a 1998 Benjamin Franklin Award for the Arts, bestowed by the folks at the Publishers’ Marketing Association.
Appollo was described by John Wood, a prizewinning poet, critic and photographic history professor at McNeese State University, as “a well-known photographic historian and one of the great authorities on the Boston daguerreotypists Southworth and Hawes.” Wood described “Humble Work and Mad Wanderings” as “a major contribution to scholarship; the most comprehensive documentation of (19th and early 20th century street life), and a book no social historian can afford to be without.”
This and other lofty descriptions concerning Appollo the scholar and photography expert bore no connection to the stories I’d been hearing about arson, serial moonings and threats to the morality of homeless teenagers.
As Scott began to fill in the gaps over a couple of tall boys, I began to get the notion that I was descending into a realm between reality and cinema, with Appollo embodying the persona of various award-winning film roles played by Jack Nicholson. When he finally appeared and invited me upstairs to talk, this cinematic effect only deepened.
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
In the apartment cluttered with rare, small treasures from forgotten times, Appollo related his version of events:
• That he and his longtime girlfriend had split up during the preceding year — and not amicably. According to Appollo, the two had bought the house together, over his initial protests. “I’m opposed to owning shit,” he said. “I’m an anarchist. But she wanted me to buy it, so I did.” There had been disagreements over the disposition of the property, he said, adding that he told her at one point, “Just give me my 45 grand and I’ll go away.”
• That the bitterness felt by his ex-girlfriend led to a number of complaints against him he claimed were either untrue or exaggerated, and that led to action by local officials. One of the alleged complaints was that he had set a number of fires, including one on the railroad tracks (an allegation also mentioned by a number of Rhinebeck residents during my investigation, but never corroborated by police);
• That, as the result of these and other alleged incidents, he was at one point “busted to the psych ward for two weeks” by four state troopers and a local crisis team. “I made it clear to them I wasn’t going to go peacefully,” said Appollo. “I was passively resisting, and I took out three of them. I ducked and they sprayed two of their cohorts with mace. If I’d have been in a kick-ass mood, I’d have taken them all out.”
“I wasn’t charged with anything, ’cause they thought I was crazy,” he continued. “If I’d have known that, I would’ve robbed a bank or something.” He also claimed at the time he was going to sue the hospital for $10 million, an action that never materialized. “They ignored about one-third of my patient rights,” he said.
• That upon being released from the hospital, he learned that his dog, a Shih Tzu named Shanghai Crazy Horse Geronimo, was missing.
As good as it gets
This last revelation began to unravel for me what had until that point been a consuming mystery, one that had brought me to Rhinecliff that afternoon in the first place. The words “Boycott the Hotel” and “Surrender Crazy Horse, Anton!” had shouted in bold painted block letters from the twin doors of Appollo’s garage facing busy Shatzell Street for going on two weeks. Following his release, Appollo had been engaged in a running feud with Anton Tybus, son of the then-proprietor of the Hotel Rhinecliff, over the disputed whereabouts of Crazy Horse. Tybus, who had taken over from a woman Appollo identified as “Renee” in caring for the dog while Appollo was in the nuthouse, admits to having initially kept the dog. “We all just thought the dog should have the best home,” said Tybus at the time, adding that he didn’t think Appollo was treating the dog properly.
Nonetheless, Appollo prevailed upon Tybus to return Crazy Horse, who promptly disappeared again a few days later. My investigation turned cold here: Tybus claimed the local dog warden took the Shih Tzu away, and Appollo insisted Tybus still had him.
You can’t handle the truth …
One of Appollo’s primary aims, during what turned out to be the short time he had left in Rhinecliff, was to make things uncomfortable for the more affluent, conservative-minded element he believed was destroying the relaxed, laissez-faire attitude of his adopted burg. “I’d like to buy up a few of these places, paint signs on them and drive all these people out of here,” said Appollo unapologetically. “Did you see that “Fuck You” sign in my third floor window? That’s my attitude right now.”
For a time Appollo, who claimed to have met Nicholson, remained as intractable as his hero as the doomed anarchist holdout in the face of stiffened opposition from his neighbors and continued visits from law enforcement. “The last time the psych people came, I told them this is ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ with a happy ending, and you guys are gonna lose.”
Following a few more incidents and arrests, Appollo saw the writing on the wall and left town. His girlfriend sold the house, which has since been converted into one of Rhinecliff’s more genteel, elegantly muted edifices. In place of the offending garage, now stands an upscale architect’s office. The hotel, where I sat years later having a $20 brunch as a jazz singer serenaded us in English and French, was closed by the authorities, sold and torn apart to the nubs before being rebuilt as an architect’s dream, eradicating the last vestige of anarchy from the hamlet. For a time I’d receive missives in my mailbox from Appollo, updating me on his continued mad wanderings. One was postmarked from New Jersey, where his mother lived. Another came from Portland, Oregon. He wrote about wanting to travel to Paris to watch them exhume Jim Morrison from his grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery.
Years went by, and unsolved mysteries gathered dust. I saw Scott once in Tivoli, at the Black Swan pub. His new address, he said, was a trailer sitting on the property of a former Bard student who was living off a trust fund. Scott had been sailing on the Hudson that night and had pulled in the boat up on the rocks, but had forgotten to tie it up, and it had drifted off on the tide. I drove him down to the shore in the dark to try and find it by shining my headlights into the river, but it was gone. “She’ll come back,” he said. “She always does.”
The bartender that night, soon to be the bar owner, was Mike Nickerson (not Nicholson, although he’s nearly as popular a figure, in Dutchess County anyway). Mike was the former bartender and manager at the old Rhinecliff, back when the music was great and the scene was red hot. Some things never change, they just move upriver.
Ken Appollo, however, was an ancient, sepia-tinted memory, like a daguerreotype stuffed into a side drawer of my brain.
Wendy … I’m home!
So you can imagine my surprise when I answered my cell phone one night in September 2009 and was assaulted by an improbably gravelly voice. “Steve! What’s shakin’ buddy?” It was Ken, and he’d been back for a while and was actually living in a comfortably nondescript apartment complex in Rhinebeck, the seat of the municipal authority that had run him out of town 11 years earlier. He had been following the Hudson Valley Chronic, had written a book and wanted to know if I’d publish it in serial form.
I said I’d take a look.
We both appeared a good ten years older than the last time we’d met, which was about right, although we wouldn’t have been able to pick each other out of a lineup. For one thing, he was significantly shorter, and had trouble walking. Mine was the first appointment in a long afternoon of visiting personages he expected to drop by. “I’m a little low on funds right now, but I made 50 grand yesterday,” he said, as upbeat and forward-looking as he ever was when taking his meds. “I brokered a half-million-dollar collection. Five percent from the buyer and five percent from the seller. A couple of phone calls, man, and a few letters. And I’m living here for free, man, this is rent-subsidized by HUD. The department of rehabilitation. I’m being rehabilitated — it’s about fucking time. Rehabilitation Support Services. I have a housing specialist, a case manager, a therapist, a nurse practitioner … I’m well taken care of. And I’m gettin’ a hundred-thousand-dollar inheritance in January. My mother passed away, and I’m getting 100 grand.”
The last detail …
Which explained one outstanding mystery: where Appollo had been for most of the past decade. “She lived in Jersey. I took care of her for seven years. She had Alzheimer’s.”
Appollo’s “book,” titled “Notes From Exile” and identifying the author as “Ken Appollo, the Rhinecliff Anarchist,” was a potential mixed-media classic, and I was wondering if I could figure out how to render it properly in a black-and-white tabloid newspaper. The dedication page read thusly: “To the good citizens of Rhinecliff — without fools there would be no wise men.” Original artworks, letters, collages and photos vied with passages of memoir, opinion, philosophy and prescient advice. Explosively colorful and graphically interesting, as well as a good read, it really should have been a coffee table keepsake for anyone harboring latent anarchist tendencies. It was not the work of a madman, but of an artist and thinker. I remember telling him I hoped it would make him another hundred grand.
But then, as Ken was wont to do, he disappeared again, without a trace, until I found his sad obituary this afternoon. His colorful masterwork, unreadable by Ken in his final days, has disappeared as well, presumably unnoticed in a box in one of his remaining siblings’ basements.
Which is what will happen to this and all the other remaining chapters of “Death Takes No Holiday,” unless I get cracking before the eyes wear the fuck out.
