Nothing But Money (12 page)

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Authors: Greg B. Smith

BOOK: Nothing But Money
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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.
Money was what made you somebody in this nasty world.
The psychiatrists had much to say about Cary and his money, sometimes dropping into vague language that removed personal choice from the picture.
One wrote, “Earning large sums of money became an integral part of his intra-psychic reparative defense mechanism.”
Translation: Cary used money to mask the fact that he couldn’t relate to people.
They called this “extravagance.” They listed all the things he did with his money: “He lived a lavish lifestyle, taking luxury vacations, driving expensive cars, and having brief romantic involvements with scores of women . . . He has few interests outside of maintaining a façade that will impress others with how fit or successful he is, e.g. working out in a gym to appear physically in good shape, wearing expensive clothes, sporting a healthy tan, and so on. He is a devotee of tanning salons.”
Most importantly, they made it clear that no matter how much Cary collected each week and how much time he spent in a tanning booth, it wasn’t working. One claimed Cary “could never trust anyone in an intimate relationship” and noted he “has no long-term close friendships.”
They had plenty to say about where this all started, and nearly every one of them attributed some of the blame to his mother. They noted how she had forced him to assume an adult role at a tender age, even after she’d returned home from the hospital: “He never again regained the parental supervision and nurturance that he had known in the past. He was his mother’s confidant, baby sitter and general factotum. He was forced to assume a façade of false bravado and maturity while remaining insecure and inadequate beneath the veneer he cultivated.
“He was like a frightened little boy masquerading as a grown-up.”
By 1989, the “frightened little boy” had had enough of psychiatrists. He stopped seeing the psychiatrist he’d been seeing regularly for five years. Now, two years later, his mother was dead.
She had died slowly, of many cancers, at the young age of fifty-two, wasting away on morphine down in soulless Florida, unable to get out of bed for months now. It was not a surprise, but it certainly hurt. It should have inspired in him a sudden urge to reexamine the past. What could she have done differently? What could he have done differently? Why is life so sad? Unfortunately for Cary there wasn’t time for any of that.
His mother’s death was not just about the past. It was also about the future, and her name was Erin.

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