by Bailey Thomas, Cynthia,Thomas, Peter,Short, Rochelle,Saunders, Keith
Six months later, my wife and Porsche joined me in Miami. In 1984, racial intolerance was lifting, but an infestation of Uncle Toms was on the rise. I had the pleasure of working for one who had a spit-shine, gold grill. He was my district manager, and he did everything humanly possible to try to convince me that being a Wendy’s manager was the best fucking job in the world. On a weekly basis, he’d feed me dump trucks of bullshit on how I could have my own district in less than eight years. He was crazy as hell!
I had just left some Uncle Tom shit in New York. Why would I want to get back on the same plantation working with a different commodity? I always give him props though, because he taught me a lot of great business practices. I just had no ambitions of managing a damn region of Wendy’s. I wanted to own them! The owner and founder of the Wendy’s restaurant concept was a guy named Dave Thomas; mine was Peter Thomas. So, I took my ass back to Brooklyn to see where my famous surname could take me.
My dad got me a job as a day laborer on a construction site. In 1985, I was making $32 an hour, but I hated working in the extremes of 20° below and 120° weather. Quitting my construction gig forced me to enter into work that I wasn’t proud of. Not having an income was never an option for me, and street hustling was the easiest way of keeping my family afloat.
By the time Peter Anthony Jr. was born in April 1987, I was the man – driving fancy cars and hanging with mobs of beautiful women. I was living between New York and Miami, where my street endeavors helped me prosper even more. I was going through the revolving doors of a treacherous world where I risked my freedom on a daily basis. Thieving cops were known to rob dealers and send them straight upstate to do hard time. Or even worse, I could have been robbed and killed by a street thug.
I took some of the money I had put back and opened a shoe store. Once it got going, I sent for my family to join me. Truth be told, it was over between my wife and I before Peter Jr. was born. We had been together for six years and grew further apart each year. We rushed into marriage in our early twenties without really knowing each other. Once we discovered who the other was, neither was interested. We separated when Peter Jr. was around nine months old. We lived detached lives in different cities for years, but stayed legally married for another decade.
With all that happened in my first marriage, I was still open to the possibility of settling down and being with one woman. Meeting Cynthia twenty years after my first committed relationship, my heart told me she was the woman I had been waiting for. I liked that she saw me as an equal partner. She had a Plymouth Rock belief in me, and she backed it up with her actions by moving to Georgia.
We talked about creating a world of our own where she could jump on a plane at a moment’s notice, model all over the globe and have an enviable life. We believed we could have an incredible existence together – with our beautiful supper club (Uptown) being a big part of it. But the recession had a plan to take us out like Hurricane Katrina.
In trying to keep Uptown going, everything that could go wrong, went wrong. The only bright spot in the darkness was an act of goodness by my landlord. He knew my history as a businessperson and offered to carry my rent for five months. He was a decent guy who would have held me down for another year if I’d needed him to, but it would have only put me deeper in the hole. The rent was just one aspect of my obligations. I was also struggling to pay utilities, vendors and employees.
Not being able to meet payroll was a cancer of its own. When you can’t pay people, they take on a vicious sense of entitlement and start stealing from every end. I was desperate and delusional to think it was just a rut that would pass. The recession had shit upside down and people had literally stopped spending.
Everything in my life went south. My dad’s retirement money and the last of my savings were tied up in my fading dream of Uptown. I could barely keep the lights on. Paying for a wedding seemed like a pie in the sky fantasy that would never happen. I became the poster child for angry black men. I was pissed off almost every day, and it was hard to feel anything else.
Watching my finances spiral out of control was like watching a movie about someone else’s life. I loved Cynthia so much, and I still wanted to make her my wife. I had always thought marriage should never be about money, but I knew she’d already turned down three suitors that were easily $100-million men. I couldn’t let her story end in financial ruin just because she chose love over money. I refused to let her get away! It was up to me to figure out how to throw a supermodel’s wedding on a budget.
Cynthia’s Control Tower
I always tried to flip negatives in my life into positives. Peter and I had begun to establish a home and life in Atlanta. There was no reason for us not to become man and wife. Noelle had also been questioning if Peter and I were going to get married. She was at an age where my choices would eventually flavor the ones she made as an adult. I didn’t want to irresponsibly influence her principles in life. She had a way of making me look at things through a different lens.
I was also conscientious of the fact that people in Georgia were especially comfortable with interviewing complete strangers about their marital status. I had begun to feel the heat from the flames of hell that came with shacking up in the heart of the Bible Belt. Two years in, Peter made his intentions official by asking for my hand in marriage. It was time to plan a wedding!
Since I never had any ambitions of marrying, I certainly had none for a big, lavish wedding. I envisioned Peter and I getting hitched somewhere on a private beach (maybe Anguilla) surrounded by a handful of friends and family. A wedding wasn’t the only thing I hadn’t foreseen in my future – our reality show was the other hiccup. Being on television weekly meant we had a mini nation of people who were expecting invitations. My vision of a quaint wedding was dead before I ever birthed it.
Peter has great architectural taste and knew a venue off the beaten path would be right up my alley. Earlier that year, he had attended an event at Atlanta’s renowned Fernbank Museum of Natural History. He thought the site would be perfect for our wedding and reception. I got chills the first time he took me there. When I stood in its thirty-foot-ceiling atrium, surrounded by the life-sized dinosaurs, I knew I had to get married under the belly of one.
Against my every attempt not to, I turned out to be a typical bride, with my wedding plans focused on everyone but me. The only element I managed to stand firm on was that I wasn’t wearing a white dress. I was initially sold on wearing a black gown, but I wanted to make a bold fashion statement, so I opted for a hue in the platinum family. My BFF and acclaimed celebrity stylist, Kithe Brewster, was the inspiration behind my dress.
For most brides, the dress is the piece de resistance of the wedding, but it wasn’t for me. I just wanted to look good. I gave Kithe total control over the design, as long as the end product was truly Cynthia-inspired. He came up with the impeccable couture creation and Rubin Singer designed the dress. I didn’t see the final rendition until a week before the wedding, and with the exception of a few minor adjustments, it was flawlessly me.
When Peter and I started planning our wedding, we had a significant amount of money spread over multiple accounts. By the time we reached the midway point, we were basically working with pocket change that could be managed in a piggy bank. Thank God for Tony Conway of A Legendary Event! He took being a guardian angel to a whole ’nother level. After sitting down with him, we refused to consider other caterers. He was accommodating and wanted to give us the wedding he thought we deserved – regardless of our finances. He insisted we not worry about the cost, even if it took us twenty years to pay him back.
Tony’s focus was entirely on making our wedding impeccable. He was dedicated beyond comprehension, and I will forever be indebted to him! We became friends as a result of his generosity and ability to turn a stressful situation into a legendary event. Peter would be my new husband, but Tony was the knight in shining armor that made our weddi
ng spectacular. Even today, we won’t to do an event without Tony and his extraordinary team. Thankfully, we can now pay him without postdating the check.
Under the financial weight of Uptown’s decline, Peter was also juggling the responsibilities of supporting our household, paying business expenditures and managing our wedding costs. My mother and sister could see we were in trouble and continually questioned whether marriage was an appropriate next step. People would be surprised to learn that my family genuinely loves Peter. Prior to our marriage, their only reservation was that Peter’s financial issues were becoming mine.
I’d always been able to more than adequately support myself, and my family had only seen me live an extravagant lifestyle. When I went virtually bankrupt, they felt like they did too. There was no one else to resolve money matters or pick up the slack. I was the community bank, and when my funds evaporated the neighborhood reserve dried up too. It naturally made everyone leery of my union with Peter.
My folks were conservative and old-fashioned. Peter was a hustler and risk-taker who (in their eyes) represented uncertainty. I think it’s instinctive for a parent to worry about its child; even though I was a forty-year-old woman, I was still my mother’s baby. As long as Peter’s finances were shaky, she couldn’t get comfortable with the thought of us being married. It was hard for her to understand that I was completely sold on his vision.
You can always find money, but you can’t always find love. That’s why I contributed all I had to give Uptown the best shot at succeeding. It was a huge part of our lives and had become one of the characters in our storyline. We shot a lot of key and memorable scenes there. We felt compelled to keep it going and didn’t want to lose it in front of the world. We truly did everything in our power to hold on, but it reached a point where we had to jump ship or go under with it.
We never anticipated how devastating or lasting the recession would be. It had a profound effect on our relationship, finances and intimacy. We thought Uptown would be our retirement nest egg. I, for one, never expected it to fail and certainly didn’t intend to lose my life savings. What started off as a $15,000 contribution, became another $25,000…then another…and another…until I lost track. Once I’d given Peter the first hundred thousand dollars, I felt the only way I could protect my initial investment was to continue fronting him capital. I kept thinking every round would be the one that would get us back in the black. I was wrong.
My series of uncharacteristic money decisions had my mother and sister reflecting on the men who had pursued my hand in marriage. Each could have set me up for life. Why had I chosen to take roots with one who had serious money troubles? The reason was clear and simple in my mind. I saw Peter as a boss and a visionary. Donald Trump had lost millions, went bankrupt more than once and managed to come back. Why couldn’t Peter? I believed in him with my whole heart and wanted to keep the lights on in the eyes of the man I loved.
Weeks before the wedding, everything came to a head. We were so broke we didn’t have money to cover our alcohol bill. Since my father had done so little for me throughout my life, my mother suggested I ask him for help. I was more interested in soliciting his support just to see if he would rise to the occasion. I called and gave him the “what had happened was” version of my and Peter’s situation. I asked for $5,000 but told him I could make $3,000 stretch to take care of everything.
Even though I promised to pay him back as quickly as possible, part of me hoped he would give it to me as a back-pay, child support gift. My heart longed to hear him say, “Baby, you don’t have to pay me back. I want to do this for you! I owe it to you!” Sadly, those words never reached my ears, and my heart felt like it had been sliced by one of those As Seen on TV Ginsu knives. He immediately started in with a variety pack of excuses, “Well, there’s a lot going on in our household. We just paid the down payment for our cruise. I wish you would have asked earlier...” He didn’t even have the courage or respect to just give me a straight up “NO.”
I didn’t know the specifics of my father’s finances, but I knew he did well for himself and could have made it happen for me if he wanted to. It was the only time in my life that I needed him to come through for me and he devastated me in every way. It hurt me to my core. I had already asked him to walk me down the aisle and his conscious decision not to give me the money didn’t change my mind. Revoking the invitation wouldn’t have gotten me the money anyway.
Our wedding was set to be RHOA’s Season 3 finale, and I was too stressed to be thrown off course by his selfishness. My mother agreed to loan Peter and I the $3,000. The person who had been my rock over the years was also the one who saved my wedding day.
One daddy don’t stop no show!
Peter’s Control Tower
When you’re from the streets and your brain gets the signal that your life is slipping, it automatically goes into survival mode. Cynthia and I began planning our wedding when life was prosperous, with money to spare. The participation in our reality show also put us in a position to do mutually benefiting barters with local businesses. I would take business profits from here and there to do creative, legal investments. Extending short-term, hard money loans (with 25 percent interest tacked on) was profitable with quick turnarounds. When our paper got tight, even that option faded to black.
Our circumstances turned dire and the likelihood of having our dream wedding (or any wedding at all) started to look grim. My hood sensibilities came up with an idea to get help from our production company. I called them up and told them our ceremony was in jeopardy if we couldn’t come up with the cash to pay our remaining expenses. I drilled home the point that if we didn’t get their backing, there would be no wedding. No wedding equaled no grand Season 3 finale! They finally agreed to give me the money, only problem was, I put the check into Uptown’s account…hoping I could flip it.
I thought I had enough time to double or at least replace it, but the recession had a vice grip on people’s spending. Every day was worse than the one before. Weekends were mega-earning days for Uptown, but the economy had reached a point where our Friday and Saturday volume wasn’t much better than a Monday or Tuesday, which were our slowest days. I couldn’t recoup the money fast enough, and the production company panicked when they learned I’d misused it. Cynthia knew nothing of my proposition or that I had even received money from them, until they ratted me out!
The day they went behind my back and told her about the advance, was the same day I was able to replace it. That morning, I called my boy Kedar Massenburg and asked for help. He was the former president of Motown Records and founder of Neo Soul music. I explained to him that I was in a corner and needed him to spot me some cash until I could get back on my feet. He wired me $15,000 within a matter of hours. I took the funds straight to our caterer, but by the time I got home the producers had already dropped the bomb on Cynthia. I told her that I only did it because I didn’t want to let her down, but she was still fuming. We wound up having a heated argument and it all went down on camera. When we were done, I threw the whole fucking crew out of our house.
It takes very little for Cynthia to go into level-ten panic mode. She was used to earning $10,000 a day on a single modeling job. She never left money on the table. I liked that she took pride in building new relationships – even with small, emerging clients. If they were willing to make her the face of a campaign, she would spend $500 on a plane ticket to go do a $1,000 job. Her mindset was that she still came home with more than she left with. She was good with managing money and very conscientious. She couldn’t relate to me blowing thousands of dollars every time it touched my hands.
No one can ever convince me that the producers weren’t fantasizing that my engagement to Cynthia would be her fourth broken one. They hinted that we might even want to consider postponing our marriage until the following year. At one point, they had the balls to tell me to my face that “it may not be a good time for us to go thro
ugh with the wedding.” I wouldn’t have put it past them to be secretly hoping that the next season would open with her dating some recognizable millionaire who could boost ratings.
The move would’ve been a crapshoot for me, but remarkable television for them. They weren’t banking on Cynthia not being a materialistic woman. She managed to work through her anger, forgive me and continue planning our wedding. They must have bumped their heads and forgot we were on reality TV, not a scripted soap opera. They can’t just kill Peter Thomas off like a telenovela villain. I thought they knew!
Cynthia’s Runway
The day of our wedding, I awoke anxious for it to be over and done. My tank was on E and I had nothing left. There was a camera in my face from the time I opened my eyes at 8:00 a.m. that morning until 1:00 a.m. the next day. Other than champagne, I went the whole day with hardly any other beverage, and I barely remember eating at the reception or even tasting our wedding cake. The mental fatigue I’d endured in the planning process was much worse than the physical. I was completely exhausted.
My glam squad and I spent most of the day shooting in my bridal suite. They primped, plucked, bustled and fussed over every inch of me. It was a mechanical day that felt more like one of my catalog shoots, rather than the high of my wedding day. There was so much happening, I was delirious. I just wanted to get through another hair and makeup session, meet Peter at the end of the aisle and sleep in for the next three days.
The wedding could not start until the entire cast of Housewives was present and seated. The women were always notoriously late, and the delays left me drinking even more champagne. The dead time also gave our guests an opportunity to get good and saucy, which was a homemade recipe for infinite drama.
Speaking of which, little did I know my mom and Malorie were elsewhere in the venue nestling their necks in a noose. They were still distressed over the fact that I was financially and emotionally in a place they had never witnessed. They were doubtful of Peter’s ability to support a family and viewed him as moody and stressed out.