Piper Weiss - You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession

The use of the word love to suggest nothing is as old as the English language.

Malcolm D. Whitman, Tennis: Origins and Mysteries

This book is based on interviews, police reports, documents written by Gary Wilensky, hundreds of print articles and television transcripts, as well as my own memory, which occupies the same organ responsible for emotional responses and invention. Capitalization is used to denote direct quotations from Gary Wilenskys own writing.

The timeline of events in Gary Wilenskys life is based on reporting. Undocumented moments, chronologies, and conversations from the distant past are pulled from my imperfect memory and intended to reflect an honest but individual interpretation of events.

Several names have been altered to protect those private figures who made their way into this book. For privacy, Bianca, Sarah, and the boys from other prep schools are composite characters based on multiple students I knew growing up.

In addition, an early police report referred to Gary Wilenskys final two victims as Mother and Daughter. Their names were made public in subsequent articles published after the incident. Out of respect for the Daughters privacy, the victims are referred to herein as the Mother and the Daughter.

Gary Wilensky is Gary Wilenskys real name.

Look. There is a man filming a movie across the street from the bus stop. He lounges on the hood of a parked car in a spandex bodysuit. His face is covered by a handheld camcorder. When he lowers it, you see hes wearing a black ski mask.

Peek through the window of his camera. He is filming two boys, eleven and twelve, waiting for the bus.

Each morning they stand right here on Fifty-First and First Avenue until the first of two public buses takes them to school. The block is at an incline overlooking the United Nations building, where flags flap like dusty rugs shaken out in a backyard. The bus moans toward the stop and gasps open. The boys, with their shirt buttons and book-bag zippers, step through the doors. Follow them. Watch when one of their small hands reaches for the cord above the window. Listen for the ping and see the sign light up in red above the drivers head. Next stop is where they get off.

Notice when they sit down on the bench to wait for their second bus, the man in the mask is already there, standing across the street with his camera pointed in their direction.

There he is again, at the first bus stop, the following morning. Now he hangs from scaffolding like a monkey off a tree and uses his free hand to snap photographs of the boys.

And there he is the following day, kneeling with his camera aimed up at their faces. He has moved to their side of the street, closer than he was before. Notice his mask is made of leather and fastened with laces at the back of his head.

One morning, as one of the boys leans against a brick building waiting for the bus, the masked man comes over and leans right beside him. When the boy shifts position, the man does the same, mimicking the boys movements.

You think they must know each other. You think this is performance art. You think he wants money, but he is harmless. You wonder if he does this all day. You wonder if youll read about him in the papers. You think youll say something if the man gets any closer to the boys, but the next day he does, and you dont.

On this particular morning, the masked man approaches one of the boys seated inside the bus kiosk and sits down beside him. When the bus arrives, the boy stands up and so does the man. He raises his fist as if he might hit the boy but punches the wall instead. This all seems so choreographed and intentional, it must be an act, you think. But years later, youll see the boy on TV telling the talk-show host how frightened he was. It seems as though he was mad, the boy will say. Like we didnt do something we were supposed to.

The next time the boys arrive at the bus stop, they are joined by an older brother for protection. He spots the masked man and alerts the police. The following morning, when the masked man begins filming, an undercover officer is watching in a parked car nearby.

When the masked man spots him, he gets into his car and drives off. Follow the siren lights down the block. See the man pull over.

Now he is pressed against a car door. He is without his mask, but his back is to you as hes placed in handcuffs so you cant see his face.

You watch an officer open the trunk of the mans car. Inside, there are stacks of videotapes, hundreds of hours of footage the man shot of his three subjectsthe two boys at their bus stops, and a third child, a little girl. Every day she walked to school, unaware that a masked man was filming her, following close behind. You wonder if someone will tell her now, or if shes better off not knowing.

I didnt mean to hit her. It was an accident. We were practicing serves. I dropped a yellow ball on the green clay court. It bounced twice before I caught it and tossed it upward. One arm reached for the inflatable canvas ceiling overhead; the other swept a Wilson racket clockwise from three oclock to six to nine. The girls face was at ten. A bone-crack shot through the tennis bubble. Balls dropped on other courts. Necks turned, eyes followed.

The girl heaved forward and cupped her hand over her nose. Lines of blood ran between the cracks in her fingers, then down one arm and off the cliff of her elbow. When she hurried off the court, she left behind a dime-sized black stain on the clay and two gape-mouthed girls who stared at me but didnt say anything.

It wasnt my fault. Youre not supposed to stand so close when someone is serving. You shouldnt talk to other girls when its someone elses turn. Youre supposed to pay attention to the person with the ball.

The girl I hit is sixteen and popular. I know because Ive seen her name on flyers for prep school parties. When she steps onto the tennis bus, she pauses to smile for invisible cameras before taking her seat. Her hair is black like my mothers, but around her crown where it shines the most, its the color of lightbulbs. Her tan is Sephardic and sealed with winter break at the Boca Raton Resort and Club, or the Breakers in Palm Beach. She has that popular-girl stance: arched upper back, one foot outturned for supportlike shes pregnant on her chest, like her whole body is buckling under the weight of her breasts, like theyre the heaviest and most important things anyone has ever carried.

A week later, the girl I hit isnt back on the tennis bus. All through the lesson, I checked behind me before I swung my racket to show the other two girls how careful Id become. On the next court, the girls younger brother slapped balls into the net and then turned to glare at me.

My sister had to get an operation, he tells me after our lesson is over and were on the small yellow school bus headed home.

He is in the vinyl seat in front of me, sitting backward with his knees burrowed into the cushion so he can face me head-on. His hair is black and shiny like his sisters, only his is cut into a bowl over his forehead. When his fingers brush it back, his forehead pops out like a belly from an unbuckled pair of pants. He is my age with sandbag cheeks and a knapsack he straps to both shoulders. There is nothing popular about him.

It was an accident, I repeat, though I hadnt actually said it out loud before. Is she going to be okay?

Yeah, he says. But the swelling might not be down in time for my bar mitzvah, so...

I take a hulking bite of the Whatchamacallit candy bar Id been saving for the ride home, and he throws me a disgusted look.

My moms pretty upset, he says before turning around to face forward in his seat.