Nothing But Money

by Smith, Greg

  Tradition was not on the mind of the nineteen-year-old Villanova freshman named Francis Warrington Gillet III who stood at the cashier’s window, trying to convince the guy behind the iron bars that placing a bet with a $5,000 personal check from a teenager was a perfectly normal occurrence. The guy wasn’t buying his pitch.

  The clock was ticking and Warrington knew he had to do something drastic. He wanted Affirmed to win and Alydar to place, and the guy behind the window was practically laughing in his face. The guy had his suspicions. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money for a kid Warrington’s age, regardless of the last name involved. Warrington was dropping every name he could think of to sway the guy, but it wasn’t working. Then he got an idea: why not take the check directly to a trustee of Pimlico his stepfather knew?

  Warrington knew that being the stepson of John Schapiro might make the difference. John Schapiro was a devoted gambler. It made him feel alive. He spent most of his waking hours thinking about the next horse race, the next poker game, the next interlocution with his bookie. He knew everybody at the tracks, from the stable boys to the trustees of Pimlico.

  There was only one problem with the whole scenario: Warrington knew very well that there wasn’t a thin dime in his checking account. He was betting it all on the idea that the stars in the heavens would fall into alignment just for him. He craved quick cash (who didn’t?), but he also sought that feeling of euphoria that comes when you take a chance and you’re right. He knew he wasn’t taking the biggest chance of all time. Affirmed had already won the Kentucky Derby with Alydar placing, and he was favored to do the same today. But you never knew what was going to happen when you plunked your money down at the cashier’s window. Alydar, after all, was the only horse to have actually beaten Affirmed. You were always taking a chance. And Warrington liked taking chances. Of course, it helped if you actually had some money to bet. With only a few hours to post time, he did not.

  He did, however, have his stepfather’s name to drop. He went to Plan B. He managed to talk his way into the trustee’s office less than an hour before post time, and dropped Schapiro’s name as many times as he waved the check in his hand for the important man to see.

  “Now, son,” said the Pimlico trustee, “are you sure you have enough money to cover this?”

  “No problem,” said Warrington, and the deed was done.

  Warrington knew that was a lie. He knew he’d crossed a line, but he was testing the difference between recklessness and confidence. He was nineteen years old. That’s what you did.

  He made sure to return to the same cashier, just to see the guy’s face when he noticed the trustee’s signature on it. The guy said, “Are you sure you want Affirmed to win?” Warrington nodded, and walked away with his tickets, filled with both excitement and fear. He got as close to trackside as possible to watch his life either soar into the heavens or crash into the mud. It was now out of his hands as the horses assembled in the paddock and the race time buzz began to grow.

  The way nineteen-year-old Warrington saw it, pretty much everything was out of his hands. He’d gone to Gilman as his mother had instructed and somehow managed to graduate. No high honors, but a diploma nonetheless. He’d been accepted at Villanova and was planning on declaring a major in economics. All of this made his mother quite happy. Outside his mother’s view, he lived a different life. A second life. He lived his stepfather, John Schapiro’s, life.

  He read the Racing Form daily and bet on horses with his stepfather whenever he could. He would regularly visit his real father in Palm Beach, where he learned what it’s like to live well, but he had come to terms with his stepfather. He was learning some interesting things. The man introduced him to the adrenaline of high risk, and it was as addictive as any narcotic. He had come to love taking chances, and the bigger the better. He really had no expectations of failure. He was absolutely positive he would do well, be rich, meet lots of beautiful women. He was nineteen. He had all the time in the world.

  The gates crashed open and the Preakness was off. Believe It—who’d finished third behind Affirmed and Alydar at Kentucky—took the lead along the rail. Affirmed remained along the outside, running head-to-head with Believe It by the first turn. Warrington appreciated that moment. He knew Affirmed had been trained by veteran Luz Barrera and Believe It had been trained by Barrera’s son, Albert. At that moment, it was father against son.

  An also-ran, Track Reward, pulled ahead in the first quarter mile, but then Affirmed took his place out front by the first half mile. Alydar was still well back. By 1:11, Affirmed led Noon Time Spender by a length, followed by Believe It and then, close behind, Alydar. And then Alydar began to move.

  At the five-sixteenth pole, Alydar pulled into second place.

  Warrington’s stomach began to roil and quail. Five thousand dollars he did not have. What would he do? What would happen when the check bounced and his stepfather got a call from the president of Pimlico? Would he be banned from the track? Would his stepfather? Would the police be summoned? What would they call the crime? Fraud? Deceit? A stupid teenager trick? Would he be kicked out of Tally Ho for good? Would Schapiro sit down that afternoon and rewrite his will?

  Affirmed and Alydar were now neck and neck. Heading into the final stretch, Affirmed was in front in the middle with Believe It coming on strong at the rail, and Alydar pulling up fast on the outside. The jockey riding Alydar began hitting his horse with the whip in is left hand, then switched to his right to slap furiously away. In the upper stretch, from where Warrington was sitting, it was tough to see which horse was out front.

  Then it was over, and Warrington was leaping into the air, howling like a dog, ecstatic. Affirmed by a neck. A neck! Alydar placed. Just as Warrington had hoped and prayed.

  “The race was unbelievable. The turns are going up and down, up and down. If Alydar had won, I’m out. I collected $15,000. I took $5,000 of the winnings, went over to the window and got my check back and ripped it up.”

  He stepped back outside and looked up at the cupola to see the painter going to work, coloring pink and black on the weather vane that glinted in the sun. Pink and black were now Warrington’s favorite colors. He looked at the $10,000 in his nineteen-year-old hands. He couldn’t wait to tell his stepfather what he’d done. He would appreciate the temerity, the fearlessness of such a crazy stunt. Turning $5,000 he did not have into $10,000—now that was the difference between recklessness and confidence.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Now that she was dead, Cary suddenly realized he’d spent a lot of years talking to psychiatrists about his mother.

  He’d seen one when he was just eleven, on orders from his mother, and then after he got out of college he’d begun formal analysis. He spent hours with the guy, trying to figure out why his childhood seemed more complicated than everyone else’s. His running theme was that he was basically a good guy who was constantly foiled by external forces. He learned all the phrases. Choices weren’t choices. There was no right and wrong. There were the “methodologies.” The “methodologies” involving his mother had taken up quite a bit of time.

  Of course they had. Was there anything more complicated than the relationship between a mother and son when there was no father in the picture? His stepfather the doctor didn’t count. The real force in his life, the real mystery, was clearly his mother. At one time she was a model, but when a real estate developer came along with the promise of material comfort and security, she got married instead. That’s where it got complicated.

  When Cary was nine years old, a woman he’d never met before showed up at the Cimino family’s comfortable little home in suburban Oyster Bay, Long Island. She claimed to be the former wife of his father. This was news to Cary. It was also news that his brother and sister weren’t really his brother and sister. They were stepsiblings. His only sibling by blood was his sister Andrea. The woman wanted custody of her children. Cary’s father said no, and an ugly dispute migrated to the courts. Stress levels
inside the Cimino homestead elevated. Then on a weekend afternoon when Cary was home, his father was standing in the kitchen when he suddenly collapsed on the floor. He had had a heart attack. He was dead.

  Within days the children Cary had believed all his life were his brother and sister went away to live with their real mother, taking most of their deceased father’s assets with them. This left nine-year-old Cary alone with his mother, a woman who’d never held a real job, and his little sister, Andrea, who was by now seven years old and confused about the sudden changes unfolding around her. They still had the nice Long Island house, but now they had no income save government benefits stemming from Cary’s father’s demise. They needed to change their way of living. Cary’s mother was not prepared for this.

  “I had a unique childhood. I would say that since my father’s death, my mother was never the same. My mother had a very difficult time as a young widow left with debts. She lost what she knew. And I’m saying this in hindsight. It must have been so difficult for her. Just my sister Andrea and I, and it was just us left alone for an extended period of time when my mother was hospitalized.”

  Cary was too young to know precisely why his mother went away to a hospital, but he was quite aware that he and his sister were now all alone in their big old Oyster Bay house, a nine-year-old in charge of a seven-year old.

  “We were left alone to care and feed one another,” Andrea remembered. “Cary would go to the hospital and get our mother to sign the checks and then mail them out. I remember on three separate occasions hiding out and not answering the door. We knew it was some kind of social services and they might take us away and separate the two of us. I recall my mother telling me never to let them separate the two of you.”

  How many people on Sutton Place went through that? Cary was proud of the fact that he had de facto raised his younger sister by himself. They pretended as if nothing had happened. The two children stayed home alone in Oyster Bay, dressing themselves, making themselves breakfast, taking the bus to school each day, coming home and doing it all again. This went on for months. Whether the bus driver ever noticed that the Cimino kids’ mother never seemed to come to the door is not known. When social service agencies showed up, the kids would hide and eventually the agency people would go away. The outside world had no idea what was going on.

  “There was a lack of any supervision,” Cary remembered. “We lived in an affluent neighborhood and the authorities really didn’t bother us. I dressed Andrea every day and Andrea and I went to school every day.”

  Finally his mother felt well enough to come home, but not well enough to behave like a mother: “When my mother came out of the hospital, she signed checks and I became my mother’s confidant, the male role model in the house. I helped facilitate paying bills. I filled out checks, my mother signed them. We mailed them.”

  Just before Cary turned thirteen, his world once again changed radically. This time his mother met a doctor she decided she’d marry. Under most circumstances, this might seem to be a positive development. The doctor was wealthy and lived in a nice house in a suburb north of New York City. Not quite. The doctor had four children of his own, and none of the four wanted anything to do with Cary or Andrea. Here was Cary, turning thirteen and moving from Long Island, away from his childhood friends, to the new and foreign suburb of Suffern. The four new kids who hated him were supposed to be his new brothers and sister. This was not something he would have wished for, but it was to be. And naturally, it got worse.

  The doctor had a rule for all his kids: no TV before 6 p.m. One afternoon Cary’s mother came home to see the doctor’s oldest son, a teenager, watching TV before six. She told him to turn it off. He refused. A verbal exchange ensued and escalated. The teenaged kid pushed Cary’s mother across the room and she fell. She broke her wrist. When the doctor learned of this, he did nothing about it. Divorce number two followed within months.

  Again Cary, his sister and his mother were on their own. This time the financial pressures increased. Now they were forced to move into a lesser subdivision in Rockland County, next to Suffern. This meant Cary would see his former stepsiblings—including the one who’d assaulted his mother—in the hallways of Suffern High School pretty much every day. He would say nothing; they would say nothing. It was as if they had never known one another. For Cary, now living in reduced circumstances, humiliation became a daily event.

  Once again his mother was searching for a means of support, but now she was forty years old. She found what she believed was the solution by getting pregnant and allowing the twenty-four-year-old drug-abusing father to move in with her family. The new baby was a girl named Erin, and Cary didn’t get to know her. He was focused on one plan—getting away from this family as fast as possible.

  “I left the house in 1978. I didn’t speak to my mother for several years. I actually took it as a breath of air to what was going on in the household. I was able to attend college by three or four methodologies. I received Social Security checks and Veterans checks because I was considered an orphan, and I used those monthly deposits. I received financial aid and I received some academic scholarships.”

  With a little help from the government, Cary enrolled at Boston University and majored in biology. He declared himself pre-med. Boston University was a liberating experience. He was away from the burden of family for the first time in his life, and BU in the late 1970s was a fun place to be. There were keg parties at the high-rise dorms on Commonwealth Avenue every weekend. There was all-night disco at Lucifer in Kenmore Square and an expanding punk scene at the Rat across the Square. Boston was paradise.

  In college, Cary learned quickly that money impressed people. A lot of his fellow students came from wealthy Long Island families and he could talk that talk, too. With women, he started making a point of mentioning that he was pre-med. Saying you were a biology major didn’t cut it. Discussing endoplasmic reticulum and photosynthesis wouldn’t get you laid. The fact that he might one day be a doctor got the attention of certain women right away. In this way Cary decided money was a powerful aphrodisiac.

  In fact, Cary was coming to believe that money was the defining characteristic of people. You either had it or you didn’t, and if you had it, more people wanted to be around you. If you didn’t have it, nobody wanted to be around you. It was as simple as that. Unfortunately for Cary, he didn’t really have it quite yet. He was telling everyone he met he would one day be a doctor, but the money wasn’t there to turn a boast into reality. He was spending so much time scrounging for cash just to pay his rent and phone bills and Boston University’s backbreaking tuition, he didn’t have time enough to complete the arduous tasks necessary to get into medical school. Now that was hard work. As graduation neared, Cary quietly dropped the medical school scheme and focused on simply getting out in one piece. In June 1982, Cary Cimino graduated Boston University and stepped into the real world, his plans for a career in medicine a childhood fantasy abandoned.

  Money was what he needed, so he returned to the source—New York City. He had loans to pay off. He had people to impress. He had family to help.

  Returning to New York was a complex matter. While he was far away at BU, his mother and sister had visited only once. He had pretty much pretended they didn’t exist. Now that he was back in New York, just a few miles from Rockland County, he realized he’d have to accept the fact that they existed. And when he returned after four years away, he realized they were barely existing.

  His mother and sister were having a tough time. Her live-in boyfriend, fifteen years her junior, was a nightmare. He was addicted to drugs and rarely around. She was trying to raise a baby and enter the workforce for the first time in her life. Cary’s sister, Andrea, had also become involved with drugs and was not pleasant to be around. Cary believed that once again external forces everywhere were conspiring against him. He’d tried to escape at college but returned to find that nothing substantive had changed. His family was still his family.

>   He went to work as a commodity broker’s assistant, got his license and began working all the time. The money was spectacular, but some always went to his mother and two sisters. There was never enough, and what did he get in return? The way Cary sometimes saw it, his mother had abandoned him and his sister when his father died. She’d chosen to do that. She let them fend for themselves while others took care of her at the hospital. And as the years passed, she continued to steal his childhood even after she came home, relying on Cary to deal with financial issues and ultimately fighting with him over money. When he was a senior in high school, she’d argued with him about Social Security and Veterans benefits he was receiving because of his father, demanding that she get a share of the money every month. Once he’d gone off to college, he’d practically had no contact with her.

  But after he came back to New York and started making it on Wall Street, for some reason—he wasn’t quite sure why—he changed his mind. He began supporting his mother, her youngest daughter, his half-sister, Erin, and his blood sister, Andrea, in a big way. He sent them money, bought them cars, flew them around the country on vacations. Was it guilt? Did he blame himself for their troubles? Although he was seeing a psychologist, he tried not to think about it. Instead, he wrote checks. It was a lot easier. He had figured out that money was important to his mother. She knew what he knew.