What was I thinking back then? That my professors wouldn’t take attendance, that I was finally away from home and I had time – plenty of time – and that people would never actually notice I wasn’t ever where I was supposed to be, or would fail to see that I was driving Peter’s orange VW bug, with its key broken off in the ignition for easy starting, navigating through the pre-dawn gloom to the airport every single Sunday for two months to pick up the beige weed package shipped by Peter’s cousin in California, holding my breath as I passed Franklin Field, never knowing if the riot cops often stationed there by the fascist police chief Frank Rizzo might be awake and watching me chug by in a neon orange bug, for chrissakes, hardly a nondescript vehicle, but also getting to smoke the ounces he offered me as payment, alone, night after night with John Fahey’s mournful instrumental blues populating the darkness in my single dorm room located right smack by the front door in my corner of the quad, so close to the gate you’d think they figured I’d be gone soon enough, my name easily deleted by the registrar, but there I was, still on campus, sometimes dreaming my way through the projected galaxies of Astronomy 101 or writing a one-act play about violent underwear salesmen in English Comp for Professor Bidwell, who said my play really wasn’t working – strong emphasis on that word “really” – but then deciding she’d hold onto it just in case, by some impossible fluke, I ended up semi-famous one day, or just never going at all to the Intro courses in Sociology and Philosophy, and where the hell did they hold the Selected Readings in Latin class anyway or, for that matter, where was the goddamn dining hall, I never found that, not once, preferring cheese steaks from the Classic Sub Shop on Locust or Cy’s Penn Luncheonette, aka the Dirty Drug, then burgers and purple bug juice at the White Castle on Spruce Street, religiously, once the munchies hit after midnight.
But really, why was I there at all?
Why me, at the University of Pennsylvania, where Humphrey Bogart’s son lived in the dorm opposite? Or why me in urban West Philadelphia, which was about 98% black and brown – how could a white, small-city kid fit in there? I had gotten in early decision at Amherst and Penn, so why didn’t I choose the smaller school?
Maybe it was just legacy: my father had graduated from Penn early to join the Rangers in 1943 so he could start fighting on D-Day, and my older brother was there now, two years ahead of me, in the business school and playing on the Division 1 hockey team. Maybe it was because I had been captain of our team at Albany Academy, but when I showed up at the first team meeting, stoned and out of shape, it barely registered when the coach, Jim Salfi, almost laughed me out of the room. What was I doing there?
And apart from that, I mean, who would have noticed, with golden-boy John Spencer and so many others dropping acid and climbing into the trees outside College Hall, if one out of 1800 Penn freshmen was out of place, or absent from some particular place somebody in charge specified as a place I should have been? Maybe I was thinking I was the only one who would escape a final reckoning. Or perhaps if I was kicked out, my girlfriend Helen would leave Boston University and we could hitchhike around Europe together. What I certainly never believed was that anyone in Philadelphia would have cared, or missed me, especially my brother. So on Sunday, October 29th, 1967, inside Ye Olde Tobacconist at 38th and Walnut Streets, where I was salivating over the sacred wall of carved meerschaum pipes in the back room of the smoke shop, I was surprised when this nebbishy little guy – who looked like Allan Sherman with his oversized eyeglasses, his Little Rascals haircut, and with pointy fingernails that looked feminine — reached out to shake my hand, held it a few seconds too long, and started talking to me.
“I’ve spotted you in this shop before. You’re a regular here, right?” he began. “Penn students make up most of my customers, so I keep track of them, and I have Ed come in on Sundays just for them. You know my partner, Ed Cohen, don’t you? I’m Stephen Weinstein.”
Of course I knew Ed Cohen. He’d gotten me hooked on his special cherry vanilla blend of Burley and Virginia tobaccos, but I’d never seen this Stephen character before.
“You like these pipes?” he asked, with a dismissive wave. “These are okay, but my rare ones aren’t here. I keep them at my Pier 37 store in the Colonial complex at the far end of Spring Garden Street. That’s the original Ye Olde Tobacconist, you know, but it’s closed on Sundays. I only opened this Walnut Street location a couple of years ago. If you’ve got nothing to do today, I could show you my really excellent pipe collection downtown.”
“Nah, I’m busy today. Maybe another time,” I told him.
“You sure?” he shot back, a little too fast, then stepped closer. He pointed to a pipe carved into a dragon with its tail arched under and up toward the stem. “I’ve got another one like this, but bigger. I know you’d love it.”
Odd word for a pipe, love, and the way he stretched it should have creeped me out, I guess, but I was thinking about what dope in a giant, smoky-mouth, dragon-block meerschaum would taste like. Then reality hit: this small dragon pipe was 195 bucks, and the giant one at his other store could be twice that. Even with a hefty discount, way beyond my budget, so why go look at more gorgeous pipes I couldn’t afford. Plus, the Sun Ra Arkestra concert started in an hour, on the second floor of the student center, wherever that was.
That was the psychedelic quote, from Sun Ra himself, centered in wavy day-glo colors on posters all over campus. I couldn’t wait to see what was what with that cat.
Nah,” I repeated. “I’ve got this far-out jazz concert I’m going to.”
And that was that. Weinstein the schlump stared at me, blinked a few times, and walked out of the back room. I heard the front door slam, and then saw him pass by the window, duck-walking toward downtown.
The next afternoon, Monday the 30th, as I strolled along Walnut Street past Pagano’s Italian Restaurant, trying to forget about Astronomy class, I saw the tobacconist running up the street, glancing over his shoulder as he ran. “Hey,” I said as he got closer. “I’ve got some time today to . . .” But Weinstein was already beyond me, monitoring an approaching bus, hustling over to the stand and hopping right up and in as soon as its doors whooshed open.
* * *
Eleven days before, on October 19th, John W. Green III, an 18-year-old Penn freshman from Des Moines, Iowa, had also visited Ye Olde Tobacconist on Walnut Street and met Stephen Weinstein there, just as I had, talking about pipes. But Weinstein had learned a whole lot more about John, who played the flute and was a ham radio operator; who loved boats and was a great swimmer; who wanted to major in chemistry so he could go to med school and be like his dad, John W. Green, Jr.; and who had recently bought a guitar, too, and was teaching himself to play it. Weinstein told him about his other store at Pier 37 and, if John wanted to, he could go down and see those really excellent pipes three days later, on Sunday the 22nd.
When John showed up at the shop that Sunday, Weinstein offered to get him a hamburger for lunch, and John ate it while they rode in a taxi to the downtown store. But while John was looking at the pipes afterwards, he got so drowsy he had to lie down, and Weinstein spread a couple of red tablecloths on the floor for him. That was his favorite part, when these gullible college kids passed out and he could pull out his ripped jeans collection. The jeans weren’t as powerful as the Boy Scout uniforms he used to tear up when he was young, but they still did the trick and got him hard. As he rubbed the torn fabric through his fingers and lay the strips across John’s unconscious body, he thought about how much he hated these jumped-up preppies.
How smart could they really be, falling for his Mickey Finn hamburger ploy? Not one of these brilliant college boys had ever noticed the ground-up sleeping pills mixed in with the hefty dollop of mustard. So if Weinstein were such a 29-year-old loser, like neighborhood people said behind his back, still living with his parents over their grocery store, Myer’s Market at D Street and Wyoming Avenue, how come he ended up in charge all the time, in his own elite tobacco shop, doing whatever he wanted to these Ivy League geniuses? And now, finally, he was almost ready. He stared at John’s brushed Levis, how tight they fit up against his ass. Then he tugged them down, bunching them around John’s splayed ankles, and unbuckled his own belt.
Weinstein had hired local teenagers from nearby Fishtown to kill the Penn students he had drugged and assaulted for the last couple of months, but they never did. They took his money, usually fifty bucks per college kid, and they told him they killed them, but that wasn’t the truth. Jimmy Hammell, a 14-year-old junior high student, was Weinstein’s usual go-to guy. At first, he had hired Jimmy to clean up around his Pier 37 store, but pretty quickly began asking for other things, like would he beat him with a stick, or tie him to a chair and gag him with a towel. Sure, for a few dollars, Jimmy could do both of those. But he drew the line at murder.
When Weinstein had done what he wanted with each of his fancy college freshmen, he would usually hand Jimmy a length of rope, say “Strangle him,” and leave the shop for a long walk. There had been two named Bill the month before, in September, one who worked in a parking booth close by the Colonial complex, and the other a college kid Weinstein had hit in the head with a lead pipe. Then earlier in October, two more from Penn, Henry and Casey, both of them too woozy to walk. Jimmy had brought them back to their dorms and told them to stay away from Weinstein, but he took the money for the jobs anyway.
By 3:00, John was still unconscious, so Weinstein called Jimmy to come over and help. When he got there, Weinstein held out the usual length of rope, but Jimmy said, “Unh-uh, not me. You do it,” knowing Weinstein was too chicken for that. Then Jimmy knelt down next to John and tried to wake him up, slapping his face. When that didn’t work, he propped John up and sloshed some cider into his mouth. No luck. Weinstein handed him some ammonia and he held that right under John’s nose . . . Nothing. “Pour it down his throat,” he demanded, but Jimmy refused. So Weinstein grabbed the bottle and jammed it into John’s mouth, but as the poison worked its way down, John arched into a convulsion.
At that, Jimmy jumped to his feet and said, “That’s it. I’m done. I’ve got to get home for supper.”
“Okay,” Weinstein said, looking at him funny, like maybe he knew Jimmy had lied to him. “I’ll take this one back to the dorms myself.”
* * *
On Tuesday, October 31st, nine days later, I didn’t know any of that. Nobody knew anything about it yet. John’s father, a doctor at Iowa Methodist Hospital, was convinced from the start that foul play was involved. He and his wife, Virginia, had flown in from Iowa right after John disappeared. They were frantic, of course, but Assistant Dean of Students, Stephen Miller, didn’t have any answers he could share with them. What he also failed to tell them was that another student had lodged a morals complaint against Stephen Weinstein three weeks before, but the University had decided not to inform the police or the district attorney about that until John Green had disappeared. Why open that can of worms while distraught parents were searching for their son? John’s dorm-mates in Butcher Hall were all worried, too, but they at least tried to comfort Mr. and Mrs. Green: “Right away I took to John,” said Ted Fernberger, his roommate in 211. “He seemed like my friend the minute I met him.”
“One of the finest guys on the floor,” Bruce Dichter chimed in. “A down-to-earth guy, no hippie, not a way-out type. Just an average, all-around person, with his own ideas – an individual.”
John Yoffe told them, “Your son did everything with a plan. He was really organized, and spent every night studying. I’m sure he didn’t just take off somewhere.”
For my part, I had never met John, and truth be told, what I was most concerned about – what was weighing on me that Tuesday, the 31st of October – was that Peter wanted his weed delivered to his place, pronto. I usually held onto it for a week or so, until he came by my dorm room to pick it up. I didn’t relish having to bring it to him. Peter lived with four or five other Penn seniors in a ramshackle house north of the campus on 42nd Street near Haverford, a down-at-the–heels black neighborhood where white Penn kids like me stuck out.
But that night was Halloween, so at least there were cowboys and princesses and pirates and Disney cartoon characters dragging their parents along every hazy street, and the cop patrols were thicker than usual. Not only that, but the weird smoke that had hung over the city for the last few days was making the night even murkier. West Philly always smelled bad because of the refineries out beyond the airport, but as I hurried across 42nd, the stink felt palpable, and nobody jumped out to hassle me.
Peter and his stoned housemates were sprawled on a couple of ratty couches in the front room, watching the dancers kick off The Red Skelton Hour on TV. The episode’s title flashed onto the screen – “Hippy Days Are Here Again” – and for some reason Peter thought that was hysterically funny. When he noticed me, he leapt off the couch, grabbed the weed package away, and told me to take his seat. I said hello to the group, but all of them had their eyes glued to Red’s opening monologue on the tube.
“Can you imagine what Halloween is gonna be like this year,” Red was saying, “with all those witches wearing miniskirts?” At that, one guy on the other couch slid down to the floor, doubled over. I figured he was tripping, because he formed a circle with his hands to peer through. “Red’s words are popping out in thought-balloons,” he slurred, tracing the images he must have been seeing in the air with one finger.
“Halloween is fun,” Red continued, “but for the elderly folks it’s not very nice. Like last year, every two minutes there’s somebody knocking on the door, and I’d get up and answer it.”
“Answer the fucking door,” the tripping guy shouted, and everybody ignored him.
Red was trying to finish the joke: “I’d feel sorry, not for myself but for the couple next door. But they weren’t elderly. They were newlyweds.”
Raucous, canned laughter from the show. Stoner guffaws from the couches. I was looking around to see where Peter was when all the boxes in the corners suddenly registered for me. Shallow cardboard boxes, with Kenwood or Sansui or Pioneer or Yamaha printed on them, were stacked ten or twelve high and sandwiched between bigger square boxes sporting Zenith and Motorola and RCA Victor logos. And the next room over, with a dinged-up dining table and chairs, was crammed floor to ceiling with twice as many boxes. I may have been willfully clueless much of the time in those days, but even I could recognize stacks of stolen goods when I ran across them. Acting as a fall-guy – picking up weed for some upper classman – that was bad enough. But if robbery and grand larceny were next on the list, maybe it was past time to step away. I got up and left before Peter came back.
* * *
On Monday, October 23rd, Stephen Weinstein called Jimmy Hammell and said, “The kid didn’t wake up this morning, so I hit him in the face with a board. Think I broke his nose. He still wasn’t moving, but I strangled him anyway. Now he’s dead for sure. Come over to the shop tomorrow and help me with the body. And tell Vincent and Ray I’ll need them in a couple of days.”
Even though Weinstein had bragged to the boys about killing other students and burying one of them – a kid named Dave, in the cellar under the first-floor grocery store of his parents’ house – John Green was his first actual murder. But drugging college kids and screwing them finally wasn’t enough for Weinstein. He had to prove to himself he could finish the job, and he had prepared for it. He had bought a sleeping bag and a green steamer trunk at an Army/Navy store, telling the clerk he needed something not only waterproof but also big enough for a person to climb in and out of, for a magician’s act he was working on. Then he had lined the trunk in bright red silk and left it sitting open in his downtown tobacco store, waiting for the perfect time.
Weinstein wasn’t in any hurry. Jimmy showed up on Tuesday afternoon and helped him stuff John into the sleeping bag and slide it out of the way. Out of sight, in one sense, but probably not at all out of Weinstein’s mind. Maybe there was something comforting about having John there, like a quiet overnight guest, or maybe as indisputable proof of his greatest accomplishment. Just he and John, alone together, for two days.
On Thursday morning, Weinstein rented a car and picked up Jimmy first, then Ray Witt and Vincent Meyers at Franklin and Palmer Streets. Jimmy got in back with Vincent and Ray took over the driving, with Weinstein sitting in the passenger seat, directing. “We have to pick something up at my store,” he told Vincent, and Vincent knew better than to ask questions. At the store, there were papers and rags scattered all over the floor, and a sleeping bag coiled in a corner. When Weinstein told the boys what was in it, Vincent got so scared he wanted to fall through the floor. “His name’s John Green,” Weinstein said. “We have to get him in the trunk and bury him.”
None of them wanted to touch the bag but Ray finally grabbed one end. Vincent and Jimmy reluctantly hoisted the other end, but then one of John’s feet suddenly poked out. A putrid smell filled Vincent’s nose and, without thinking, he grabbed the bare foot and shoved it back inside the bag. The skin was cold and hard, and it made Vincent want to puke. They wrestled with the bagged body for a minute or so, but finally they folded it and crammed John Green into the trunk. Weinstein slammed the lid down and locked it with a key.
Jimmy had to be home for supper by 5, so Weinstein gave him his fifty dollars and they dropped him off on Girard. Then they stopped to buy two shovels at a hardware store on Kensington Avenue. As they passed a drugstore, heading west toward Route 76, Weinstein pointed it out: “That’s where I buy the sleeping pills, one for every day of the month,” he said, “but I never take any of them.”
Ray had gone to a summer camp near the Appalachian Trail in Hamburg, about twenty miles north of Reading, and he figured nobody would be around there in the last week of October. But when they arrived, the whole place was flooded. So they drove to another remote spot a little farther north, by the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, but the ground there was already frozen. After that, they drove around in the dark for about an hour, looking for other lonely spots, but Ray and Vincent finally convinced Weinstein to go back to Philadelphia.
Pier 38, just a couple of blocks from the tobacco store, was deserted. Weinstein made Ray and Vincent load some gravel into the trunk, and then they pitched it into the Delaware River. It went under for a minute, but then it eased back to the surface, as if to put them on notice that John wasn’t ready to disappear just yet. “Get some bigger stones,” Weinstein barked, but the trunk floated out of reach. “Don’t worry about it,” Ray said. “It’ll sink.”
Weinstein looked nervous then, and Ray got worried he might not pay them.
“It’s late,” Ray reminded him. “My parents might start looking for me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Weinstein said, and dug in his back pocket for his wallet.
* * *
Someone was pounding on my door, far away, in some remote, uptight country where they apparently didn’t smoke dope on Halloween night or eat greasy cheeseburgers an hour before dawn. So it was noon, so what. Who the hell would know or care that I was still sleeping at noon on a Wednesday? Let me guess – perhaps an upstanding member of Phi Delta Theta, the jock fraternity house on Locust Street, and proud business major in the Wharton School? Yup, right again, my older brother, that’s who.
“Get the fuck up, you junkie,” he was hollering, as if he and his hypocritical, pumped-up frat brothers didn’t drain kegs like Irish teamsters at their house parties every goddamn weekend. Still pounding, he yelled, “I can smell the pot out here in the hallway, loser.”
I struggled out of bed, still in yesterday’s fragrant clothes, and opened the door. My brother took one long, appraising look and then stepped back. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “You’ve done it now. Wait ‘til Dad hears about this. You’ll be calling Saigon home before next summer.”
And with that, he was gone.
I was still tired, plus I’d heard that threat from my father before: no tuition equals no student deferment. Elementary, my dear Watson. I was surprised my brother was still so flipped out about my smoking dope and missing a few classes. Plenty of his white-boy frat pals were potheads themselves, I was sure, but maybe just secretive about it. I was even more amazed he wasn’t on the warpath about Joan Baez joining the anti-war sit-in at Logan Hall, assuming I’d be on my way there to chant against Penn allowing Dow Chemical and the C.I.A. to interview students on campus. But nope, that wasn’t it, and it turned out my concerned brother was as good as his word. Within half an hour, Denny Keating knocked on my door and told me my father was calling for me on the dorm phone. Denny was the R.A. who lived at the end of our floor. He smoked a pipe, too, bought weed from me sometimes, and had even gone to Ye Olde Tobacconist with me once or twice, so he was cool. The phone call was quick:
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”
“You’re finished in December. Start packing. I’m not paying for you to be an addict,” he said, and hung up.
Denny could see what was what. He started to say, “I don’t want to make your day even worse but . . .” and then just handed me a copy of The Daily Pennsylvanian for Wednesday, November 1st. It was impossible to miss the headline:
There was a small picture below it of a smiling, handsome kid with glasses and dark hair – with his name all in caps underneath it – the same class picture that appeared right after Byron D. Green in the University of Pennsylvania Class of 1971 Freshman Directory. Denny went back into his room and I started reading.
I skimmed the article until I got to this part:
The article went on, but I had to stop there. I saw Weinstein’s long fingernails again, and his words from three days before echoed inside my head: “My rare ones aren’t here. I keep them at my Pier 37 store . . .” Those pipes were the last image John saw, and I wondered what he had been thinking as he collapsed in front of them. I hoped in that moment that he never felt any of the terrible things that Weinstein did to him afterwards.
And I’m sure I remembered saying no, that I was going to a Sun Ra concert, and realized how close I had come to being Weinstein’s next victim. But how was I supposed to feel about that, about near-death, about randomly avoiding what had killed someone else? How do we even start to understand what that means? To be breathing one minute, conscious and registering what’s happening in the world around us, taking our lives and futures for granted – all that continuing time magically spooling out ahead of us – and then just suddenly slipping into nothing. Way deeper than sleep, though, that nothing for John Green had become permanent. I had once written in a poem about my father’s mother, saying in one line, “Death doesn’t require us to keep a day free,” and I thought how stupid that sounded now, as if some cerebral, clever sentence could define someone else’s horror. How did I let the obvious keep escaping me? How had I not realized until then that being alive was temporary?
* * *
Within a day, The Philadelphia Inquirer had interviewed five boys who had done odd jobs for Weinstein during the last few months, and published excerpts from what three of them had confessed. Jimmy and Vincent and Ray – the three juveniles charged with being accessories after murder – sang to save their lives, and laid out every sick thing they had seen Weinstein do. Okay, it was true, they had been paid to load a dead body into a trunk, and they threw that trunk into the Delaware River the night of Thursday, October 26th. But wait a minute here. They were teenagers, junior high and high school students, so how come they were being held responsible for some crazy weirdo whacking a college kid? Come on, they weren’t even adults, right, so why were they in jail when Weinstein wasn’t?
John’s body hadn’t been found until Halloween, five days after Weinstein had directed those boys to dump him in the river. Why hadn’t he left town right away? He still had the rental car, and in five days he could have reached almost anywhere on the West Coast, to say nothing of Mexico or Canada, so why did he hang around? So he could look for another Penn freshman to kill, like me? Had he thumbed through the Freshman Directory and circled possibilities for one more notch in his belt before he skipped town? None of that made sense, but maybe what Weinstein wanted had nothing to do with reason.
After he tore past me and jumped on the bus that Monday afternoon, two days earlier, he had ridden to the 30th Street Station, where he caught a train to New York City. He went to Manhattan a lot. In fact, Weinstein was a big fan of theatre. He had gone to Broadway on October 20, two days before he killed John Green, to see a matinee performance of “Mame,” and then to attend the Tobacconists’ Convention at the Statler Hilton. Plus, he had been a regular customer of the Village Smoke Shop at 8th and McDougall Streets a few months before, during July and August of 1967, although Murray Weinstein, the owner of the shop and no relation, said, “I don’t know him, and I haven’t seen him,” when the N.Y.P.D. questioned him. That was on Friday, November 3rd, after the Philadelphia Police had issued a 50-state alarm for Stephen Weinstein on the charge of murder, and the F.B.I. had joined the search on a Federal Fugitive Warrant.
Now everybody was on the lookout for Weinstein. He had been clever, riding the subway day and night, cleaning up in barber shops, and buying his food at Horn & Hardart automats. But he couldn’t resist Broadway. On Saturday afternoon, he went into Mackey’s, a ticket agency next to Sardi’s on 44th Street, and stood in a corner to light his pipe. Then he suddenly recognized a guy – Eddie Sherman, a ticket broker with an agency on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia – and threw him a sick smile. Just two weeks before, Weinstein had been right there in Eddie’s place, trying to buy tickets for another Broadway play, but it had been sold out.
When Eddie recognized him, he turned and hurried outside, but Weinstein followed him. Eddie spotted a cop half a block away, and pointed him toward Weinstein, who ran south on Broadway. Weinstein wasn’t equipped for speed, though, and the cop caught him at 43rd. At the cellblock in New York, before Philadelphia District Attorney Arlen Specter and his staff showed up to interrogate Weinstein, a detective offered him part of a small cherry pie he was eating. “No thanks,” Weinstein said. “I don’t know what you put in it.” Then he started laughing and yelled, again and again, “Get me a good lawyer.”
Extradited to Philadelphia, Weinstein claimed in court he was broke, and said his parents couldn’t pay for a lawyer either. So the judge appointed two veteran defense attorneys that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had to pay for, but none of that mattered in the end. After five months of psychiatric testing, Stephen Weinstein was found competent to stand trial, was convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. Weinstein told the judge, “All I would like to say is I hope that I can receive some treatment of some kind.”
What he didn’t say is what he had told the Philadelphia A.D.A. during his interrogation in that New York City holding cell: “Green was convulsing and I couldn’t make him stop. All of a sudden, a strange feeling came over me. I got a piece of rope and I don’t know why, but I got excited. I put it around his neck and pulled it across his throat and strangled him with it, right there on the floor. But then I used my hands to choke him, and I felt this tremendous urge. At that moment, nobody in the world could have stopped me from my need to do this. It was more than sexual gratification. It was a satisfaction impossible to describe. And then, once I saw he was dead, this terrible remorse welled up in me. It was horrible.”
* * *
Before I went home for Christmas, I found out John Fahey had a new album called Requia, his first one on the Vanguard label, with a tribute to Mississippi John Hurt on it. A record store in Rittenhouse Square carried it. I can’t remember its name anymore, but I think it was one block below the 2nd Fret, where I had seen Jerry Jeff Walker play at the beginning of October. Janis Joplin had joined Jerry Jeff on stage after her show that night at the Spectrum, and she was so drunk she had to hold the mike stand to stay on her feet. That was when John Green had still been alive.
So I caught the bus at 34th and Walnut – probably the same bus that Weinstein took to get out of town. As I made my way to the only two seats left, at the very back of the bus, I know I was wondering how to write a poem or a play about John Green’s death, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I also knew I didn’t know where to begin, or whether I should begin at all. Was it right to use someone’s murder, even one I was so close to, so I could make sense of it for myself? Incarnate a tragedy in some literary form and send it around to get published – was that right? Did I want to write about it just because I didn’t know what else to do with that awful knowledge? Hey, write about it, you’ll feel better. Is that what I was thinking?
But I didn’t write about it then. Maybe I was simply terrified to consider that whatever I wrote wouldn’t be good enough, or wouldn’t make much of a difference to anyone. More likely, I was hiding in my head, in denial that I had come so close to following John into nothing, and safely analyzing the irony that spaced-out Sun Ra had literally saved my life. In one of his poems, Sun Ra wrote this:
That one day I saw his band, the day I didn’t go with Stephen Weinstein, Sun Ra announced he was from Saturn, and who’s to say he wasn’t.
William Patrick’s works have been published or produced in a number of genres: creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and drama. His most recent book, Metrofix: The Combative Comeback of a Company Town, was published in the fall of 2021.
Three of his previous nonfiction books — Learning at the Speed of Light: How Online Education Got to Now; The Call of Nursing: Voices from the Front Lines of Health Care; and Courageous Learning: Finding a New Path through Higher Education, were published by Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press between 2011 and 2017
Saving Troy, published by SUNY Press in 2009, is a creative nonfiction chronicle of a year spent riding along with professional firefighters and paramedics. From that experience, Patrick also wrote a screenplay, Fire Ground, as well as a radio play, Rescue, which was commissioned by the BBC and aired on BBC 3. An earlier teleplay, Rachel’s Dinner, starring Olympia Dukakis and Peter Gerety, was aired nationally on ABC-TV, and his third feature-length screenplay, Brand New Me, was optioned by Force Ten Productions of Los Angeles and used as the basis for the remake of The Nutty Professor.
His memoir in poetry, We Didn’t Come Here for This (1999), was published by BOA Editions, as was These Upraised Hands (1995), a book of narrative poems and dramatic monologues, and a novel, Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family, which won the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for fiction.
Mr. Patrick is the recipient of awards in writing from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Arts Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. He has taught at Salem State University, Old Dominion University, The College of St. Rose, and The University at Albany. He also founded and directed the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute – a two-week summer writing camp at Skidmore College for high school writers – from 1999 through 2019. Mr. Patrick has been a faculty member in Fairfield University’s MFA Program in Writing since 2009.
