For me, the life and death of Gary Wilensky took place over one year, the same period my own mind became the most dangerous it has ever been. At some point both our stories nearly overlapped, though not entirely and certainly not neatly.
It began inside his car. Mixtapes in the armrest, Red Vines candy on the dashboard, roller skates and Marx Brothers glasses in the trunk. The internal clutter of Gary Wilensky’s sedan purposely defied the pristine expectations outside it. Here was a place to remove the good girl costume, if only for an hour or two.
In his car, girls could be sticky-fingered and snort when they laughed. They weren’t chastised for being too loud or shamed for hog-chewing gum.
His was a sanctioned area for childish impulse and indulgence. It’d been a while since I’d listened to my instincts or felt the spike of confidence that comes with having those instincts validated. You like that? Open it.
Maybe I am making more of it than it was: a drive between Manhattan and Queens for a tennis lesson, but for a brief time, those rides offered a break from trying so hard.
We’d showboat in his car, roll the windows down and request Grey Poupon from taxis waiting for the light. Gary never told us to stop. He wasn’t opposed to confrontation, double-honking, and cursing at drivers who got in his way. His tiny explosions were startling, and then, after a beat, hilarious. He wasn’t trying to set an example. He was one of us.
At a time when the world was still divided between adults and kids, this seemed significant enough to devise a new category for men like Gary. I called them child allies, and I watched for more. You could spot them all around, if you knew the markers.
They used winks and elbow nudges to establish a private communication, reminding you, after letting you sip their drink or steer the driver’s wheel, not to get them in trouble.
Their pockets were stuffed with tokens, little oddball gifts that didn’t require verbal conditions like please and thank you. You’d never hear them call you kid to your face, or refer to themselves as adults because they didn’t believe in labels.
They never shushed you or told you to be patient or revoked a promise because of your attitude. That was the most important condition of a child ally: He or she could never say no.
Gary never did, though now there are other terms to better explain his behavior. Grooming is one. Another is deceptive trust development—a series of manipulation tactics used in the pre-abuse stages of grooming to gain a child’s allegiance, secrecy, and compliance.
Stalkers establish private time with a child separate from other adults—at a restaurant, in their car—to engage a child in her interests, offering tiny bribes that translate into secrets shared and squirreled away, so that a child feels a sense of obligation to the adult. She might protect him or believe she owes him something, and eventually become dependent on his attention.
“I definitely remember him giving us money to buy candy,” Emma, now a mother herself, recalls when she and I speak for the first time in years. “Was that part of the fee?”
I tell her it wasn’t, and she pauses for a moment. “Yeah, it’s weird. But you know, your parents trust this guy, so whatever he does is fine.”
Gary lured with cheap sugary snacks—hiding gummies in the side panels of the car, handing us five-dollar bills for bodega sweeps while he idled outside. But it was his figurative treats that reeled me in—the implied freedom to curse, binge, and act out without punishment. We didn’t have to hide anything from him.
“He’d always listen,” one of the high school students he coached at Brearley told the New York Post in 1993. She claimed he would call her on the phone to discuss her personal life‚ her friends, her boyfriends, any problems at school.
“They are very good at talking to children,” says Dr. Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist who specializes in sex crimes and profiling predators. “They talk at their level. They’re almost one of the kids themselves, and their potential victims think they’re a wonderful person who understands them.”
Hickey classifies Gary as a hebephile—someone attracted to pubescent children, rather than prepubescents, and who craves attachment and closeness to his potential victims.
And for a while, at least, it seemed Gary was satiated by those fleeting suggestions of intimacy—creeping up to the line without crossing it.
“They’re looking to see how each child responds,” says Hickey. “It gives them a little thrill.”
Jane was a preteen at an all-girls private school when Gary was her coach. Her mother had taken lessons with Gary, and then signed her up for his junior program. Now a nonprofit coordinator based in Brooklyn, she sits across from me at a bar in Fort Greene, breaking off pieces of her grilled cheese.
“I don’t remember much,” she says of the two years she took lessons with Gary. She does recall his humor, and one night when she was alone in his car. She was in the passenger seat, age twelve, when they pulled up to her apartment building.
“I remember him commenting to me ‘You’re turning into an attractive young woman,’” she says. His statement had made her blush. “I had started taking lessons with him during an awkward phase, so when he said this I felt, like, complimented. To have an adult say I was becoming attractive felt somewhat good.”
At the camps where Gary taught, he developed a reputation for picking favorites—establishing a hierarchy with prizes and a weekly T-shirt giveaway for the girl of his choosing.
As much as it motivated young tennis players, it also elevated Gary’s influence. “He literally walked on water,” a former camper recalls. “If he said hello to you, it made your day.”
Kate, a camper turned student, compares the competition born from those prizes to beauty pageants. “If you won one of those shirts or hats, he’d parade you around the courts,” she says. “How bad it must have made the other kids feel.”
At the same time, it drove her to play harder. “You wanted to do well so he would be proud of you,” says Kate, now a television producer. “I had never before felt like that about a coach.”
We are sitting in Starbucks in Union Square. It’s been one week since the first blizzard of the season. A protest at the park across the street is just wrapping up. A young woman shuffles toward the register with a sign that reads enough is enough tucked under her arm, like a handbag.
Kate is small-boned and a fellow short girl. When she twists her hair with two hands, I see the ding of a tiny diamond in one ear. She was eight or nine when she first met Gary at camp. Like other former campers, she remembers his costumes—the clown nose, the tutu, and the roller skates—but it was his perceived vulnerability that hooked her and balanced out their age difference. As much as she craved his attention, he seemed to need hers as well.
“It never felt inappropriate in a romantic way,” she says. “It just felt like an older friend who shared a lot with you.”
It’s the first time I’ve heard someone speak of him this way. I’d seen a similar side of Gary, and it also drew me closer to him. I wanted to help him; it made me feel good that he thought I could. I ask Kate if she thinks this was a tactic he used on certain girls, if he could detect that need in us, the same way he sensed his costumes would appeal to other students.
“Maybe,” she says.
After camp, Kate continued playing with Gary in the city. Twice he took her to dinner, just the two of them. She was ten, he was fifty-six. On a Sunday evening, Gary picked her up from home and took her to Fuddruckers, the restaurant in his building.
“As soon as I got in the car, it hit me that I was alone,” Kate says. She remembers him reaching across her body to strap on her seat belt.
“Like this.” She swings an arm down to her opposite hip. “I remember being sort of, like, maybe this is weird, maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
Before our meeting, Kate called up her mother to ask her why she felt comfortable sending her off to dinner with Gary.
“You guys liked each other,” her mom said, and she was right.
At dinner, Gary showed Kate a magic trick using two forks and a quarter. Later on, his mood changed. “I have a memory of him talking about his love life and some girl—how it hadn’t worked out,” she says. The conversation had made her uncomfortable, less with him and more with her own lack of experience.
“I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I’m not equipped to give him the advice he needs,’” she says. “I felt like I didn’t have the tools to tell him what he needed to hear.”
Still, this was the side of Gary she connected with, even at age ten.
“I think the loneliness spoke to me the most, and something about feeling special,” she says.
Another former student who played with Gary as a teenager, Sam, recalls driving in his car, not knowing the exact location they were headed. Of course they were going to play tennis, but it didn’t matter where. There was an understanding that he would take each of us to the place we were supposed to be and return us to our parents when we were done. And that is what he did, always while sprinkling sugar. “I remember that, and he always came up with funny nicknames for people,” Sam says. “And those shirts, the caricature of him is what he looks like in my mind.” But she also recalls how on occasion, Gary’s mood would change.
“He had a streak when he got angry with you—maybe because it didn’t happen very often, but when it did happen, it was, like, yikes,” she says.
It reminds me of something Emma had mentioned when we caught up on the phone.
“Not long before everything fell apart, he was coaching me so I’d get on the tennis team and he was really, really hard on me. He was so hard on me that he made me cry at a lesson,” Emma said. “Do you remember that?”
I do, but that comes later.