You All Grow Up and Leave Me by Piper Weiss

Author:Piper Weiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Man: Storm

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

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