On a Saturday night in March, a cyclone banged on Gary Wilensky’s window and lit up his studio apartment in a spastic blue light. Snow spitballed in every direction, and thunder gave way to an achy, wind-borne moaning. Other families in other apartments huddled together behind windows, and those who lived alone watched them through a white veil.
The next day, ice clinked against window glass. The airports were closed. Ten inches of snow piled up in Central Park. Governor Mario Cuomo declared a state of emergency. Newscasters prattled on about the Storm of the Century and the Great Blizzard of ’93. All the shovels came out and the digging began.
Now it is Monday, and Gary Wilensky is getting himself a gun. Not a real gun, but a movie prop. Still, the one he rents from a shop that services set designers is a real .38 caliber revolver. It’s just been modified to fire blanks. The pistol is heavy in your hand, like a trophy.
Like that silver little Smith & Wesson Michael Douglas finds at his feet in Falling Down, a film that’s spent the past two weeks in the number one box office spot. Douglas’s character—an unemployed engineer with a flattop and Eisenhower glasses—blazes a warpath through the streets of Los Angeles, amassing an arsenal and taking out his frustrations over losing his job and family on anyone who interferes with his mission to attend his daughter’s birthday party. “I’m the bad guy?” he asks the cop who catches up with him at the end of the movie. “How’d that happen?”
On Thursday, when the snow has turned to cliffs of packed yellow ice all along the sidewalks, Gary makes his way to his therapist’s appointment.
He’d begun treatment shortly after he was fired by the Mother. Maybe he thought if he got help, he could wipe clean his past and all would be forgiven. It had worked once before, but that was long ago. Anyway, he’s of another mind-set now.
Today, in his therapist’s office, he has news: He’s done with treatment. He’s going to try something else.
A few days later, Gary has changed his mind. He needs a real gun. So he drives an hour east to Farmingdale, Long Island. While it’s gotten harder to purchase a gun in the city, between stringent permit requirements and the prior year’s ban on assault rifles, there are still loopholes to the law if you drive out of Mayor Dinkins’s purview in any one direction. There’s talk of the Brady Bill being signed into law, mandating federal background checks, but that doesn’t concern Gary. He’ll be long gone by the time it’s passed.
Right now, what matters is directly in front of him—the Long Island Expressway and the choices that lay ahead. Remingtons, Colts, Smith & Wessons. And real ammo. No blanks.
He is a different man than he was only two months ago at the awards ceremony. If his mood was leaden then, now it is jet-fueled.
And if he passes exit 37 on the right and sees the exit sign for Roslyn, there’s a version of Gary Wilensky who might blaze out the window, over the loose, shimmying trees and back into his old high school gym, where “Long Tall Sally” would clatter as he twirled and twirled his dance partner, all sweaty-palmed and buzzing, pulling her close to his chest and tilting her over the dance floor.
American Outdoor Sports is an emporium of weapons: pump action, single shot, bolt action, semis, slugs, choke tubes—even fixed blade knives and spear points. But it’s the Cobray 9mm semiautomatic carbine that hooks him. In February, the New York Times Magazine had a feature on street guns and the benefits of a 9mm semi, which is lighter than a revolver and easier to handle. But the standout feature of a weapon like this particular Cobray is the way it looks. It’s long, T-shaped, and bulky—a little bit Scarface, a little bit RoboCop. They call them “ugly guns” on the street because of how absurdly large they are compared to pistols.
It looks just like the “ugly gun” Michael Douglas whips out in Falling Down, when he demands the manager of the burger chain serve him breakfast during lunch hours. “Ever heard the expression ‘the customer is always right’?”
Sold. Gary will be back in two weeks for a shotgun.
In the meantime, there is more to buy. Disguises—a fake mustache, a pile of wigs. Copper red, medium brown, sandy blond, and one wig that’s grandma gray with tight little roller curls. Somewhere along the way he picks up a white rubber mask—the kind a horror-movie villain would wear to hide his charred and pulpy face. Even on its own, laid out on the floor, without a human face behind it, it is the boogeyman, shaking awake that dormant fear from childhood of the faceless man—who, up close, looks as if he’s standing far away, his expression unreadable. A masked man who wants something, but what?
Downtown is where all the kink shops are, and Gary has a grocery list of items to buy, though get him in any shop and he’ll go off book, clearing out shelves and loading up baskets. He’s a salesclerk’s dream, blowing through thousands of dollars in a clip. He can’t stop. If he’s curious about something, if he wants to take an item home and try it out, he’ll buy it—full price.
Forget what he buys in sex shops. It’s what you’d think, only the most expensive versions. Each silver link, each instrument of pain and restraint, will serve as visual symptoms of his disease.
Is there a name for what he has? There is a boundlessness to his energy. He is flooded with new ideas, new items to scrawl on a pad, new supplies he needs to buy in order to quiet his mind. There is always more to buy. He can’t stay still: bouncing uptown, downtown, east toward the shore, and soon north toward the mountains. But there is also a certainty to his mission, an inevitability that lurches him forward.
He makes lists, charts, preparations. He returns to his studio with fistfuls of shopping bags and turns to his list to check off more items. He is trying to stay organized. His mind veers. Despite attempts to categorize items in columns on the page, he can’t seem to stay on track. WHEELCHAIR is in the same column as LAMPS and SEXY NIGHTWEAR. SANITARY FOR GIRLS is in the same section as HAMMER and WINDOW BARS. RAZOR BLADES is circled with an arrow that points to BLOOD CATCHER. He writes NO TRESPASSING. He writes NIGHT TELESCOPE. He writes CARBON MONOXIDE. He writes KINKY and underlines it, adding six items beneath it. He starts a column just for food items, but forgets to fill it in. He puts a checkmark next to SLEEPING BAG, writes BAG FOR HEAD, and then begins doodling cursive letters on the other side of the page.
He starts a new section: MEDICAL SUPPLIES. He buys medical supplies. He’s found a place on East Seventy-Second Street where he can purchase a wheelchair. Also on the list, BEDPAN.
Finally, there’s SpyWorld. Forty-Ninth and First Avenue, across the street from the bus stop. Gary knows the area well. In an unremarkable building just a few blocks north of the United Nations is a toy store full of expensive traps. SpyWorld’s owner claims to be a former wire expert for the NYPD, and through certain channels that haven’t been named, he has acquired the kind of military-grade spy gear you wouldn’t think existed outside of movies.
These are not dime-store gadgets for peeping at your neighbor, but cutting-edge technology worthy of the store’s clientele: government agents, Interpol, billionaires, embittered spouses. There are long-range tracking devices, voice-altering machines, police scanners, pin-drop-sensitive security monitoring systems, a pair of $1,500 binoculars outfitted with microscopic microphones, a $1,200 parabolic laser device designed to pick up conversations from a mile away, a few $6,000 fax machine interceptors and scramblers, a set of $8,000 night vision goggles courtesy of unnamed sources in Russia. And here a James Bond section, with hidden microphones disguised in Rolexes, beer cans, and silver coins.
Gary was once so giddy while shopping here, he posed for a picture. At the time, his hair was still dark. He wore a fluorescent blue windbreaker over a fluorescent blue pullover. A mustache ran straight across his face as if it’d been stuck there with adhesive glue. Maybe it was. Eyebrows arched, smile naughty, he stood before a wall taped with articles. The most visible one being a photographic spread of semiautomatic rifles.
But that was another trip at another time. This time he’s prepared to spend five figures. Tracking devices, voice altering machines, an array of hypersensitive security monitoring equipment and a pair of night vision goggles—like the goggles Buffalo Bill wore in Silence of the Lambs, when the audience sees Clarice through his eyes, filtered through green light, feeling her way around his dungeon. “You don’t know what pain is,” he’d warned.
Outside SpyWorld, the bus stops across the street. Five years ago, Gary visited that spot every morning, camera in hand, to film two boys, eleven and twelve. But first he’d tuck in his hair and tighten the laces of his black leather mask, becoming the shadow of a man. Not the Gary Wilensky who dresses in tutus and laces up his roller skates, or the cartoon one on the T-shirts, but the one who covers his face in animal skin and presses his eye to a glass square closing in on two young faces, imprinting them onto thin plastic sheets of tape, and then sealing each tape in the trunk of his car until the day came when they were finally discovered. Now here he is years later, not a new man, as his court-ordered therapist was led to believe in 1988, but an old one with a new mask.