The Long Island I know is all synagogues and reception halls—a flat suburban sprawl of Jewish celebration and mourning. So many times in the backseat of my parents’ car, black tights on tan leather, holding my sister’s hand as my father drove the long bean of the LIE—my mother on the passenger side, a perfumery of nerves. An argument outside the car, a combustible silence once inside. Shit, we’re late. In those moments, she didn’t have to say it; I could read her mind.
Now, years later, alone in a different car, the same broccoli trees lining the expressway, the same stop-and-start traffic, the whiff of dead relatives buried along the sidelines, all echo the same mantra: Shit, we’re late.
The exit for Roslyn is on the right, and I am wrong in thinking I have been here before. Two miles off the highway the trees are looser; their branches shimmy and hang low. A sandstone and granite clock tower etched with the words She fell asleep mark the very top of the town followed by a slip of eateries and shops, housed in Colonial- and Victorian-era architecture.
The village center gleams with spotless redbrick sidewalks and freshly painted historic storefronts—a microscopic Hamptons minus the Ralph Laurens and Citarellas. Instead, we have YOLO, the yogurt shop; Yuzu, the sushi restaurant; Transitions, a boutique where the clothes are high-priced and relaxed-fit. From a distance, they all look like quaint country markets.
“Read the fucking sign.” A man in his fifties, with a sweater around his shoulders, points to the stop for pedestrians placard.
It’s been a week since I visited Gary Wilensky’s old apartment building in Manhattan. The once-subsidized housing development has been converted to a condominium. The Fuddruckers is a gym. The doormen are now called concierges. I talked to one man who had worked in the building when Gary Wilensky was alive. He said he knows everyone who’s come in and out since he began. “Are you sure he lived here?” he asked.
I’ve come to Roslyn, where Gary spent his teenage years, to visit the town library, keeper of the yearbooks. I meet with an archivist in a wood-paneled room at the top of a staircase. Light from two half-moon windows illuminates dust particles. Portraits of local figures and historical maps hang on the walls. An academic calm separates this attic archive room from the library’s metallic, childproofed main area downstairs. The whispers up here feel more reverent than enforced. This is a room full of history, the traces of dead things, which must be preserved by hushed voices and delicate fingertips.
I tell the archivist I’m looking for a man who lived here in the fifties. I write Gary Wilensky on a paper square, and beneath his name, Roslyn High School, Class of 1956.
From a corner shelf, she pulls out what looks to be a photo album—a small rectangular book with a puffy blue cover embossed in gold lettering. It’s his senior yearbook. I’ve seen excerpts from it in old magazines and newspapers. I’d expected it to be bigger for some reason.
I want the archivist to go away so I can be alone with the book. She sits down beside me and looks through a binder with vintage newspaper clippings. I could shake out his photograph as if I were shaking a piggy bank with one coin trapped inside, but this is not a room for children. So I flip through the pages delicately, lingering on the formalities—the dedication to a teacher, the introductory farewell to the senior class.
Each senior’s photo is tilted faux haphazardly and pinned to an illustration of a bulletin board. The class is not large. I spot two names I recognize, two of Gary’s friends who were quoted in articles about him twenty-odd years ago. Both are described in the yearbook as “dark and handsome”; one is “Ivy League,” the other, “smart as a whip.”
“Smart as a whip” is Neal Pilson, now a retired network president. On the phone, he recalled driving in Gary’s car on a double date and playing basketball together in the schoolyard. He remembered Gary as short but mature, older than the rest of their group of friends. Popular among his classmates, celebrated for his basketball and dancing skills, but never the leader of a group. “He had a surface confidence, but we all understood he was uncertain,” Pilson said.
Some of the pages of the yearbook stick together, but when I get to W, the book flattens out, pressed by a copy machine, I imagine.
Someone was here before me, a reporter on deadline in 1993 assigned to dig up information on Gary Wilensky before moving on to the next story. Woody Allen. Michael Jackson. Monica Seles.
I imagine when he whipped into the library, the archivist must have rustled about, propelled by the mere presence of a man who knows what he wants and hasn’t any time to waste. If he asked questions, they were few and all the right ones.
Under the table, I lift one swampy heel out of a black pump. I wore pumps and a long schoolteacher skirt so I would look serious, like a grown-up, even though I am a grown-up. Thirty-seven is definitely a grown-up. Thirty-seven is the age of news anchors, congressmen, political speechwriters, parents of middle school children, crime reporters. Be a grown-up. Be the reporter.
Here is the picture that brought us both to Roslyn: Gary at eighteen, just a few years older than I was when I knew him. His hair is slicked back with a werewolf’s hairline creeping down his forehead. He wears a thin tie with tiny daggers on it. His chin is slightly lowered to downplay his devil’s jawline. His expression is gentlemanly, in control—as if he’s nodding at the cameraman to go ahead and take the picture, he’s ready. He is almost handsome.
Next to the picture is a biography penned by classmates. The first word used to describe him: argumentative. Other words follow: poet, witty character, terrific dancer, tennis and Ping-Pong champ, and the name of a classmate he used to dance with.
She is fair-haired and lovely in a prim 1950s teenage way, described in the yearbook as a dazzling blonde whose passions are dancing and Gary Gary Gary. Together they were named Best Dancers. In a photo accompanying this honor, Gary dips her. She looks nervous, enchanted, giggling up at him. He has one hand on her back, suspending her above the floor, and another clutching her hand, drawing it over their heads forcefully. He is stone-faced, looking directly at the camera rather than at his dance partner. In another photo, they are competing in a bandstand dance-off. Her face is obscured by his long jagged profile. On another page of the yearbook, the class’s last will and testament, the pair “leave their acrobatic dancing steps to anyone with the muscles to try them.”
Throughout the rest of the book there are pictures of Gary shooting a basketball, standing in the back line of the tennis team, surrounded by a half-dozen girls as editor of the school newspaper. They all show a serious, guarded-looking young man—not at all the class clown I imagined him to be.
“Do you want to know where he lived?” the archivist asks me. She’s found Gary’s old address. It’s just a few blocks up Main Street. I stop at Shish Kebab Grill on the way there. Forking a baba ghanoush sandwich up Old Northern Boulevard, I remember I have cousins who live in Roslyn. If I see them, I will have to explain why I drove thirty miles out of the city to look at photos of a dead man. I’m thinking of writing a book, I will say. Or I will pretend I don’t see them.
I’ve done this before, walked past someone I knew, pretending to be engaged in a focal point to the right or left of his or her face, bracing myself for the moment the person says my name, deflated when he or she doesn’t. It’s both a paralysis of indecision and a deep insecurity that my face is not recognizable enough to be differentiated from other humans.
Gary’s old apartment complex takes up an entire block on either side of Main Street, a few blocks in between the school and the village. The red brick has browned over time and the white icing between the brickwork is ash-gray. Inside there is no common area, just two green doors and institutional-looking stairs that lead to the second-floor apartments.
I walk two blocks north toward the high school, and if you discount the 7-Eleven, the surrounding Victorian homes and manicured walkways make it easy to imagine living here during the Eisenhower era, when an eighteen-year-old Gary Wilensky, with his heavy brow and puffed-up chest, with his tie of tiny swords, walked down this very street. Not the handsomest boy in school, though substantial. An upperclassman, certainly. The basketball star. The best dancer in Roslyn High. Argumentative.
It was his temperament that took his friends by surprise—the potential to flip his mood. The danger of underestimating Gary might result in a hostile encounter on the basketball court or worse. A Roslyn High classmate remembers the day one of Gary’s girlfriends came to school with a bruised eye. When asked about it, she had said Gary did it, and it wasn’t the first time.
I reached out to the high school girlfriend, who would now be in her late seventies, but never heard back. Many are reluctant to speak about Gary, considering the circumstances surrounding his death.
I don’t blame anyone for this. I also tried to drown out his memory in the years that followed, but eventually he sprung to the surface.
It was 2008. I was driving to a college reunion with an old boyfriend, Michael. We were both in our early thirties. He was a poet and I worked for a tabloid newspaper. We were hunting for meaning or something to do. A story we could write together about our college experience, the place we fell for each other but never dated, and now here we were heading back to Baltimore.
We traded benign college memories—the frat party where pledges swallowed live goldfish, the film professor who smoked on the Gilman Hall steps—but were soon onto the more tragic. Addiction, suicide attempts, a murder on campus.
At a Delaware tollbooth, I handed Michael a crumpled five-dollar bill. Then I mashed my palm flat over the door lock—thwarting a sudden impulse to open the door and run. A capsule had been pierced in my brain, and now a memory leaked out. A man in a trench coat with his collar turned up.
Gary Wilensky. I said his name. Gary Wilensky.
The syllabic combination, the roll of the tongue, so familiar, so reminiscent of a time I’d buried away, I wanted to keep saying it.
“I have a story, but it didn’t happen to me,” I told Michael, though I didn’t remember exactly what the story was. I knew something terrible had happened, involving a plastic blow-up doll and shackles and a wheelchair. I knew Gary Wilensky was dead, and for a moment I missed him.
Later in the trip, I sat in a campus coffee shop and watched Michael across the street dwarfed by a sculpture of Native American lacrosse players. One bronze player loomed over him, penny-green stick poised to smash his head. Michael leaned against it and scribbled poetry. Again I thought of Gary, a drawing of him in a magazine, dressed in a trench coat, arm raised above his head brandishing . . . What was it? A flashlight? A baton? A cattle prod.
“This is stupid,” I’d said when Michael suggested we each describe the statue in our notebooks. “I’ll wait for you at the coffee shop.”
We’d been arguing the entire weekend. First when my car was towed, then in front of the statue, and later in a campus parking lot.
“What is your problem?” Michael asked, hands stiff in his coat pockets.
“This isn’t the story I want to write,” I said, because I was frustrated. I had questions that couldn’t be answered here, with him. I had a thought that needed to be completed, and everything that didn’t involve that thought was a distraction.
“Well, what do you want to write about?” he asked, exasperated.
“Gary Wilensky,” I said. I wanted to keep saying his name.
“But I can’t write that with you,” he said, throwing up his hands. “That’s your story. I’m not in that one.”
This was how we broke up, in a Baltimore parking lot, arguing about another man. He was right. I wanted to do my own thing, to shake loose the obligation of partnership, to be as alone as I was when I was fourteen. I wanted to be that girl, not this one.
Years later, still alone, I have driven in another car to Roslyn to dig up remnants of Gary Wilensky’s past. I am a reporter, I tell myself, because that is better than being a person with an obsession.
I am prone to obsessions. I know this. I fixate on one person compulsively. It is a brand of OCD that involves putting my eyes on every word or image pertaining to a specific person in order to feel in control of other parts of my life.
Jim Morrison came first. It was an obvious choice, an early teenage cult-follower move, spurred on by newbie sexuality and Oliver Stone. Though the obsession was less romantic than it was relentlessly mathematical—always counting the number of pictures of him that belonged to me; always memorizing his poetry, each unscripted moan in his songs; running through the encyclopedic collection in my head; believing that I could put him back together if I just had all the parts. And years later, when I was too old for it to be cute, the target was Keith Moon. Same thing—all the pictures, all the books and stories. Not even the music, this time, but the famed antics, and the photographs of his sticky bangs, his wild, puckish eyes, his glorious, mythologized self-destruction. For a year, I counted the pictures of him on Google Images until I could fall asleep each night.
The infusion of a dead man into my daily routine felt safe and made me less lonely, less desirous of real partnership. It made me feel in control of someone who was legendarily uncontrollable, and in effect braver, more in touch with the wildness inside of me.
By this point, I have spent months coming up with new search terms to enter into a borrowed Nexus account, variations of Gary’s name misspelled, and feeling with each discovery—a Geraldo transcript! A 1984 UPI article!—that flimsy dopamine drip that squelches from the brain when an addiction has become routine. More.
I have already read everything about him on the Internet, which is strange in itself. Had his crime taken place now, there would be personal accounts from his students on social media, essays with click-bait headlines, a Facebook group, perhaps a hashtagged collection of photographs on Instagram.
Instead, the trail of Gary Wilensky on the Internet is led by two New York Times articles and a few archived magazine pieces, a mention of his name in a book about the Catskills, another in a book about predators, and another in a lighthearted book about camp.
He is dead in the truest sense, obsolete, which must rankle his ghost. Alive, Gary Wilensky tacked Gary Wilensky’s name on everything—T-shirts, magazine ads, newspaper articles. Dead Gary is barely a few pages on Google.
Nobody cares about him anymore, which makes the fact that I do, feel more significant. The difference between this obsession and the others is that I knew him. I was alive when he was alive. We sat between armrests and breathed the same trapped air. It’s different because any worshipfulness I had for him was in the past, and any obsession I have for him now is more inquisitive. I believe that this obsession, this time, could be productive, legitimately enlightening, if I can just stay grounded in the facts.
Here is a fact: In April of 1993, the reporter called. I chewed the rubber coil and paced the white kitchen tile answering his questions. My mother listened on the other side of the swinging kitchen door.
A week later, I found the eight-page New York magazine article, “Break Point: A Tennis Coach’s Fatal Obsession,” on a coffee table in the living room. It opened to a photograph of a life-sized doll with yellow skin and a painted red mouth, slack and open.
Everything but her head was deflated. She was flesh-toned and flattened, folded up from the knees, arms crossed at her chest. But her head was round and human-sized, made of hard rubber, topped with bristly yellow hair that curled at her temples. One of her eyelids was lazily half closed as if she’d been drinking.
“A rubber sex doll found in the cabin,” read the caption.
I stared at her until my mother took the magazine away.
“You’ll finish this later.”
Twenty-odd years later, I did. When I returned from the college reunion, I visited my parents and said Gary Wilensky’s name.
My mother placed a finger to her lips and got up from her bed where we’d been sitting. She walked over to her desk, opened the bottom drawer, and removed a blue file folder with his name on it.
Between the flat planes of cardboard was a stack of jaundiced folded newspapers, a brittle Newsweek magazine, two invoices for tennis lessons, each with a résumé printed in blue ink on its backside, an index card stamped with the red outline of teddy bears and Disney characters holding Valentine’s heart-shaped messages: Luv U Lots. Be Mine. On the opposite side of the card was my address, Gary’s return address, and a label with the number for his tennis-tip hotline. Resting beneath the Valentine was the New York magazine article with the photograph of the blow-up doll. A startling image, still, so many years later.
My mother, the collector, the archivist, the character in the movie who catalyzes the hunt for the killer with a bread-crumb trail of old tabloid headlines. All through my teens and twenties I would scavenge her room when she was away, rifling through cabinets for old prescriptions, jewelry boxes for stale weed, bureaus for packaged tights, and desk drawers—that same drawer—for the manila folder where she kept photographs of two men she almost married who weren’t my father. The evidence that she was a young woman once, and I almost wasn’t. Strange how I never discovered the folder with Gary Wilensky’s name scripted in ballpoint pen until the need to claim her property had been replaced by the need to cultivate my own. All I had to do was ask.
I sprawled out on her bed to read the New York magazine reporter’s story on the life and death of Gary Wilensky. I looked for my name, but found only penciled-in brackets around two paragraphs on the third page of the six-page article. Brief impressions of Gary from an unnamed student who witnessed his mood shift in his final weeks.
I examined Gary’s old invoices, billing my mother for lessons once a week.
“Didn’t he coach me twice a week?” I asked her.
“That’s right,” said my mother. “I paid for the weekday lessons, but Saturdays were free.”
“They were free? Why were they free?” I asked.
“Because he thought you were good. He told me so. He wanted to get your game to the next level.”
“Don’t you think that’s weird, Mom?”
“No, you were good,” she insisted.
There was the folder with the whole truth about Gary Wilensky laid out on her bed. And still there was some leftover pride separate from the facts, a preserved memory of a phone call between a tennis coach and a mother about a daughter who was special. A part of her still wanted to believe him. A part of me wanted to, as well.