Mickey Ruskin

Mickey Ruskin appears in the diary in two sharply contrasting circumstances: arranging a wake for Tom Baker, then being reported dead himself. The entries also preserve a project he was pursuing before his death, a book about Max’s Kansas City and the 1960s for which he sought Brigid Berlin’s recollections.

Recollections and Work

The earlier entry records that Ruskin held a wake for Tom Baker, identified by the diarist as the star of I, a Man. Baker had died of an overdose. The diarist adds that this detail had not previously been recorded in the diary, making Ruskin’s act of holding the wake the first fact through which he enters the account.

A later entry describes Ruskin’s sustained effort to document the history around Max’s Kansas City. Brigid Berlin had told the diarist that Ruskin had been calling her for months, asking her to give an interview about Max’s Kansas City and the 1960s for a book he was working on. Her account presents him not only as connected to the club’s history but as actively seeking Berlin’s testimony for that project.

Death and Its Place in the Diary

Berlin’s report also supplies the second, final account of Ruskin: she said that he had died of an overdose at three in the morning. The diary offers no further circumstances or explanation. It moves from his earlier role in holding a wake for another person to the brief report of his own death, with the precise time marking the starkness of the news.

Together, the entries preserve a small but telling arc: Ruskin appears first in connection with a remembrance, and later as the subject of one. His planned book about Max’s and the 1960s remains unfinished in the account presented here; the diary records his repeated requests for Berlin’s interview but gives no further details about the project.