Painter. Poet. Cold-blooded Killer

Carol Levin emailed me the other day to tell me that Corey Arthur is up for parole yet again and ask me to write another letter to the New York State Parole Board in opposition. That prompted me to do a search about Corey and Jon’s murder. That search was pretty enlightening.

I learned that true crime bloggers who weren’t even alive when Jon was murdered are interested in the “mysteries and intricacies” of the case. I saw that Corey has moved well beyond his initial foray into better public relations (with a Newsweek magazine spread) to a gallery showing of his paintings, a blog, and a public rapprochement with the mother who abused him because he looked too much like his father. According to all of this publicity, Corey is a changed man: He is “an artist and a published writer, a feminist, and a Quaker.” (https://www.friendsjournal.org/she-told-me-save-the-flower/). He’s on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. He “publishes” his meditations on the art of friendship and the responsibility of being the prisoners’ representative to the incarceration committee on Medium and on an inmate blogger page on Facebook (http://inmateblogger.com/2020/08/15/introduction-blog-by-corey-devon-arthur/)

You know what Corey doesn’t say in all of his musings about earning his legal research certification and “learn[ing] how to shape out the contours of my spirit using the sources of my truth” (https://www.mygallerynyc.com/corey-devon-arthur) and bemoaning having been “arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life for the robbery and murder of my High School English Teacher?” (Facebook). He doesn’t admit to having committed the crime. He never once says, “I did it. I slit my teacher’s throat for money. I killed another sentient being for $800 and bought sneakers with the proceeds.”  Instead he prattles about smoking crack cocaine and unidentified assailants breaking into Jon’s apartment and forcing him to duct tape Jon to a chair. (How else to explain that fingerprint?)

Painter. Poet. Blogger. Feminist. Researcher. Seeker of truth. Model prisoner. Cold-blooded killer. Con artist. 

Corey is no different from Jack Henry Abbott, another “enlightened” prisoner wrongly held “in the belly of the beast” and championed by the naïveté of the “cognoscenti,” people like Norman Mailer. Remember what happened with him: In June, 1981, six weeks after obtaining parole, Abbott fatally stabbed a waiter on Second Avenue after being refused permission to use the restroom. 

If Corey Arthur is released before he admits to what he did and apologizes with extreme contrition to Gerald and Carol Levin, Lee and Laura Levin, me, and every single other friend and family member who loved Jon and was robbed of Jon, then the NYSPB and untold others will have fallen for the act. The twenty-first century Renaissance Man, simulacrum of Jack Henry Abbott, will have fooled everyone. He wins.

That’s Weird: They Always Laughed at my Jokes in Peoria

Today one of my juniors asked whether I wanted to hear a riddle.

“Sure,” I responded.

After grinning at the girl next to him, he turned to me and asked, “What did Delaware?”

Immediately I wondered, “Is this still making the rounds?” I had learned it and a few of its companions from a joke book in elementary school, a good fifty-five years ago.

“Her New Jersey,” I responded. The student’s mouth opened into a little o shape. Evidently he’d presumed I wouldn’t know the answer.

“Okay, okay, I’ve got another one,” he said, recovering quickly. “What did Tennessee?”

I leaned on the desk behind me. “The same thing Arkansas.”  

Surprised and intrigued, he asked, “How did you know that?”

I shrugged. “They were popular when I was a kid, too, way back when dinosaurs were roaming the Earth.  I drove my older sister nuts with them. Hey, what did Tennessee the next time he looked?”

The boy thought for a long moment. “I don’t know that one.”

“He saw  Idaho.” 

He laughed. Then I asked, “What was the biggest moving job ever?” At this point most of the students had stopped discussing the literary theory and were listening.  No one knew. “Wheeling West Virginia.” My entire class laughed. 

Sometimes you don’t need to be a bright, educated, adult to talk to someone. You only need to have remembered what Delawore in middle school. 

Oxford: It’s a Very Nice City

I saw a book cover today and thought of Jon Levin immediately. The book was called Where the Grass is Green and the Girls are Pretty.

*************************************************

One afternoon at Oxford I heard Jon crunching along the gravel path singing, “Take me down to the very nice city/where the grass is green and the girls are pretty” which prompted me to giggle. When he reached me, he popped off his headphones (it was the nineties, folks) and asked what was so funny.

“It’s not ‘very nice city.’ It’s ‘Paradise City,’ I told him.

“What?” His eyes widened. “It’s not.”

“It is. What’s the name of the song?” I prompted.

“‘Take Me Home,’” he replied.

“Nope.”

“Yes.”

“By Guns N’ Roses?” I asked. Jon nodded. I shook my head. “It’s called ‘Paradise City,’ hence the refrain. I have the CD in my room. Come on; I’ll show you.”

“No, thanks; I feel stupid enough already.”

*************************************************

I think of you every time I hear the song, Jon. And I always sing, “Take me down to the very nice city” in your honor. ❤️💔

Favors

Waiting in the pharmacy for my prescription this afternoon, I watched as the cash register refused to accept credit and debit cards. Musing how technology has really made our lives easier, I poked around inside my wallet. Nothing.  Uhhhhhhh oh. (Not really a surprise since J says Queen Elizabeth II carries more cash than I do.)

The clerk called my name. “How much is it?” I asked as I burrowed in my bag, hoping a twenty from tutoring remained in a pocket or under a flap. 

“Sixty-nine cents.”

“Sixty-nine cents?!” My head snapped up. “I am so embarrassed. I don’t have any cash and your machine isn’t accepting debit cards.” 

“Oh, I have sixty-nine cents!” exclaimed the woman next to me. “And I am paying for mine, anyway. Just add hers onto mine,” she instructed the clerk. 

I turned to face her. “Thank you!” I burst out.

You read about Pay It Forwards in trashy British tabloids and see it on the local news, but you never experience it in real life.  At that moment, I remembered why I wanted to move into this small northern New Jersey town where everyone knows practically everyone else. It’s because almost everyone in this small town knows and helps their neighbors. 

So, thank you to the anonymous woman standing behind me in line at Miller’s Pharmacy. Now it is my responsibility to pay it forward. 

It’s A Good Thing She Doesn’t Know How to Use Yelp

My mom was confused when we first moved her and my dad from their assisted living community into our house. Wherever she thought she was I don’t know, but she knew it wasn’t their last apartment, their last house, or any of their vacation homes.  For some reason, despite having visited us here for thirty years, our house was completely unfamiliar to her; she seemed to think she was staying at a holiday resort. 

My dad’s Parkinson’s was so advanced by then that his ability to drink from open vessels was almost gone so I devised all kinds of cup-lid-and-straw apparatuses for him.  On one particularly harried evening, I rushed in the door with my father’s favorite, pastrami and Dr. Brown’s Diet Cream Soda from his second-favorite deli, and plopped the heavy bag on the kitchen island. Diving in I began to distribute packets and cans around the table. Vikki grabbed plates, silverware, and napkins so we were organized pretty quickly.  My mother turned her head and saw my father lifting his soda can.  Turning to Vikki, she sighed then said in a disappointed voice, “This accommodation doesn’t provide straws.” Stifling a laugh, Vikki answered, “Maybe you’d better ask to speak to the manager.”

Rolling my eyes, I walked across the kitchen to the glass-fronted cabinet and retrieved the glass from Wo Fat’s Chinese Restaurant in Oahu, in which I stored a array of colorfully striped paper straws like those I remembered from my childhood. Selecting one, I popped it into my dad’s soda can. 

I don’t know how this multi-year adventure in pandemic elder care will turn out. Probably an amalgamation of really happy, extremely sad, and profoundly surreal. However it turns out, though, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. Well, maybe a month in Tuscany but not for much else.

“There once was a union maid, she never was afraid, of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.”

Today is Cesar Chavez Day.  I know that because my mother was a supporter of unions, all unions, any union.  In fact, when I was very small, she taught me to sing Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid.”  I suspect I was the only three-year-old on the swings in Devoe Park in the Bronx belting “Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union, til the day I die.”

Now, my father majored in Business Administration at Fordham and, later, in grad school at Northeastern. He started in the Westinghouse Management Training Program immediately after graduating from college. This made him less than completely empathetic to the union cause. It also made for some interesting dinner table conversations. 

“Where’s the salad?”

“No salad.”

“Why not? I like a salad with dinner.”

“I am not buying lettuce: Cesar Chavez said to boycott lettuce.”

“I don’t give a fuck what Cesar Chavez said! I want a salad!”

The conversation was replicated with grapes, strawberries, and whatever else Chavez mentioned. (Later, attending a class at Stanford where I learned about the chronic back damage caused by the short-handled hoe, I knew my mother had been right to speak up for abused workers.) 

So Happy Birthday, Cesar Chavez and thank you, Mom for teaching me about him. 

My Day Will Come

When my dad’s health began to fail precipitously, I moved into their assisted living community and distance-worked.  It was odd and also kind of tedious to be the only totally ambulatory resident as well as the sole inhabitant not requiring a hearing aid. 

The high point occurred one day while I was taking the garbage and recycling to the trash room: I passed an elderly couple tottering together in the hall. They said hello so I replied “How are you?” When I was a few feet beyond them, the man asked his wife loudly, “Did that girl say ‘I love you?’”

Only there am I still a “girl.” 

When I’m Ninety-Two

My mother loves Ricola wild berry flavor cough drops. She eats them constantly and rather than dropping the wrappers into her pocket or finding a waste basket, she plops them wherever she happens to be. 

While moving my parents from assisted living into our house, we pulled the huge brass bed away from the wall and discovered the mother lode: There were hundreds – literally hundreds – of Ricola wrappers piled in drifts in the narrow space between the bed and the wall.  Shocked, I called my mom. As she navigated around the half-filled packing boxes I pointed to the the tumble-down stack of tiny waxed papers.  “Why don’t you toss these in the waste basket?” I asked.

My mother’s brown eyes grew indignant. She drew herself up and huffed, “Those aren’t mine.”

“You’re the one who sleeps here in this bed,” I pointed out. 

Narrowing her gaze she stated, “This is an apartment. Someone lived here before me you know” and with a flourish she strode from the room. If she’d been a cat, she’d’ve swished her tail.

I hope I am that sassy when I reach her age. 

The Mugger

I was looking out the back door and calling Spencer when a worried-looking opossum popped out from the arborvitae. He stared straight ahead and trotted under the garage soffit lights across our driveway. He had an odd expression on his face, like someone leaving the subway late at night and, afraid he is being followed, tries to get home quickly without looking as though he is trying to get home quickly.

The opossum WAS being followed. Hearing a bell jingling in the wind, I turned my head back toward the arborvitae and out hopped Spencer. He trotted after the opossum with a smile on his face like “Cool! Where are you going? Can I come?”

Fortunately we had no attempted mugging and Spencer is home now.

My Mother, My Dearest Friend

I am losing my mother. Oh, she is still alive, however she has dementia and forty percent heart function so little pieces of her disappear every day.

People who have read my stories for years say their favorite character is my mother. While my mother is a terrific “character,” she also really did all those things. A patisserie-quality baker, she wondered where she got a daughter who called hazelnuts “acorns without hats.”  She bought me a canning set so I would learn how to “cook something, anything” and although she seemed pretty surprised when my strawberry jam turned out fabulous, she refrained from criticism when my version of my grandmother’s homemade chicken noodle soup became only a pot of soggy, chicken noodles because it never occurred to me to cook the noodles before dropping them into the broth.  

Yes, she stole all the copies of Highlights for Children from most of the doctor’s offices on Fordham Road when I published my first poem at age eight. She squeezed through a construction fence surrounding a condemned building so I wouldn’t “go to jail all alone for trespassing.”  She actually lost her wig on the Universal Studios Mummy ride and she even asked a sheik in Saudi Arabia what he wore under his robe. (“Boxers, madam,” he replied.) 

A few weeks ago, a day or two before my father’s death from Parkinson’s, she had no idea who he was and was shocked when I said he was her husband. She stared at me accusingly. “My husband?!” she gasped disbelievingly. “Why didn’t you tell me I was married to him?” Sighing, I answered, “I presumed you knew; you were at the wedding.”

I have learned lots of things from my mother like trying new things sometimes leads to success. If you don’t know the answer, ask the question. When someone offers an opportunity, accept it. Always wear and say precisely what you like. And love with all your heart. That’s how she loves me and God knows, it’s how I love her, too.