And now, a prompt that mostly isn't....

This is a post that's been germinating for a bit. It was almost brought out of the Repressed Memory Anxiety Closet a few weeks ago, when somebody asked us to write about the most famous person was that we personally knew who'd been made into a movie character. I've lived a fairly non-famous Upstate life these past almost 45 years,  but my hometown of East Meadow has a few I have or might have met: former Met pitcher Frank Viola, Broadway playwright Richard Greenberg, and Nets legend Julius Erving (mostly a Roosevelt kid but some sources say he lived there) were all around in the 70s, but none achieved film fame that I know of. 

This guy did:



I vaguely remember a movie being made, not too long ago, about the story of the notorious killer who I'd known since elementary school. When I found this was streaming for free on Amazon Prime, I felt a need to watch it, much like the one to slow down to watch a really bad road accident, and so I tried.

I failed. It is utterly unwatchable. The soundtrack, of both music and effects, is nails-on-a-blackboard loud.  The flashback sex scenes are something out of a 1960s stag reel (some of them may BE scenes from a 1960s stag reel), and at least in the first half hour there is absolutely no East Meadow authenticity. They change the name of his street, show a generic non-EMHS high school and a totally different hospital than the one in our town where his father died, and the street scenes are stock rolls of Capes, not his neighborhood or probably anywhere in the 11554. They don't even mention East Meadow that I caught, referring only to "Long Island."

There is only one reason to even think of for watching this drek, and that's to see the portrayal by an actor named Arnold Odo, in what so far is his first and only screen role. I last saw Joel well over a decade before the earliest events portrayed, but he NAILS the depiction, at least in terms of appearance aged out to his late 20s.

But he's come to mind many times in the 40-plus years since our paths last crossed.

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He was a misfit. Uncoordinated for sport. Interested in things none of the cool kids were. Sound familiar?  I wouldn't say we were ever friends, but I was in his house at least once to check out a stamp collection in that fleeting phase of my life. We stopped mostly being in the same classes by junior high- he had an undiagnosed learning disability and tracking put him and me on different paths- but by senior year we wound up on the same newspaper staff. I've previously posted my yearbook picture that I share with him- in mine, another evil friend drew an arrow through his head- but this one's clean and directly from the pages of  Résumé '77, with all the names named:



(I'm also in the bottom one from another staff, but up top that's Joel in the corner, one Corey away from me and my tacky 70s Qiana shirt.)

After the later events, word came out about how mean kids were to him. He ran track just to literally get away from the bullying, and the jocks on that and other teams did unthinkable things- locking him into places and getting cheerleader types to flirt with him.  We fellow nerds on the paper just used words: our final senior issue contained a "Last Will and Testament" of inside jokes about faculty and fellow students; our advisor censored us giving our least favorite gym teacher a "grammar school equivalency diploma," but he had no trouble with us leaving Joel "a shade for the lamp in his darkroom." See, he was the photo editor. Wukka wukka.

Years later, almost everybody agreed that if we'd added a yearbook poll question of "most likely to chop up 17 hookers in his mother's garage," Joel would have been close to the bottom of the list.  I'd have nominated another kid- he went to one of the other three elementaries that fed into our junior high, and when he was bullied, he acted out, stabbing people with pens and whatever else was at his disposal. But he either didn't have any diagnosable disabilities or had been treated for them, and by graduation he was just another nerdy kid. You know, like me.

Meanwhile, Joel never crossed my mind for seven years in universities and for almost another decade of practice, marriage and fatherhood- until calls started coming though in the summer of 1993. First from old friends, then from the State Police. Did I remember him? Duh, I'm two away from him in a yearbook picture. Any contact since then? None, though he did attend college briefly in Brockport, perhaps when I was either in school just  to the west or living just to the east. And was there anything in his behavior back then that he might try to use for an insanity defense? Um, he was weird, but if that's a crime you'd better arrest about 600 of us in that class. 

A pulp paperback about it came out that I still have someplace. Then the biopic from a few years ago. But apparently what made that wonderful old photo surface just now is that someone's decided to documentarize him on the Oxygen network, debuting this very day:

What would it be like to learn your loved one was capable of multiple brutal murders?

That was the nightmare Jeanne Rifkin and Jan Rifkin experienced after they learned their son and brother, respectively, had admitted he killed not just one, but a total of 17 women.

Joel Rifkin, who is the focus of Oxygen’s new special “Rifkin on Rifkin: Private Confessions of a Serial Killer,” targeted sex workers in New York City. From 1989 to 1993, he’d cruise the streets, pick women up, and strangle them before disposing of their bodies throughout the greater metropolitan area.

We dumped cable a few years back except for a few local and sports/film related sites, so I cannot sit and endure this yet. But those who have done so report that it's chilling.  I will share one other story about that unfortunate family from a few years ago, though.

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In addition to the famousish people above, East Meadow has produced a number of published writers who've made a living, or at least an avocation, out of the craft.  I've known some of them for  years- Clea Simon and a number of mystery series collections, and Susan Breen, who I knew from church as Sue Zelony, who's done both non-fiction and a novel about an aging parent titled, fittingly, The Fiction Class. Others, I've met either through them or other online sources. One is a just-retired NYC teacher a few years younger than me named Tim O'Mara. He's got a series of murder mystery novels featuring a part-time detective named Raymond Donne. A few years ago, he released Dead Red, third in the series, and he gave a reading at our old hometown library on a night I was headed to the area for other things. I stopped in, introduced myself IRL for the first time, and also met his older brother, who was a year behind me in high school. I didn't know him before, either, so when he asked what year I was and I said '77, his brow furrowed and he said, "Ohhhhhh. Joel!"

I nodded. You know the old Groucho Marx line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member? That's "Club Joel" for pretty much anyone who grew up there. He started to lean into tales of who knows what, but before he could get far, Tim shushed him:

His sister's here!

Yup, there was Jan in the front row. I never would have recognized her without the cue, but my mind went straight to boggle. She was several years younger than her brother and me- maybe knew Tim in high school?- and I remember that Joel's father had been active on the library board, but what the motivation was for the sister of a brutal killer to be checking out murder novelists in her free time?  Whatever it was, I'll never know; I listened through the reading, queued up for my autographed copy, and never saw her in the line or anytime after.  We'd heard the crime-scene house sold several years before that for over 300K, well below its original asking price. Smaller ones like our childhood home now routinely go there for over half a million. I doubt even his house got any bullshit from appraisers like we just did.

So now it's all bubbling up again. I'm told at least one still-friend of mine, same age as us who grew up on Joel's street, makes an appearance in the documentary. Freddie, an accomplished jazz-ska musician, also turned the tale into a song by his band called "Nasty By Nature," so I think we'll put this tale to an early DEATH by linking to that:
 

Watch on YouTube