“Sometimes,” he added, “it felt like all the aggression was really just between the two of them. Gary and me were in the middle, waiting for one of them to pick on us, so the other one could have something to say or do. It was like they were each trying to get the attention of somebody else, and we were merely the scapegoats.”
Finally, Frank found a way to endure the punishments. He discovered at a young age that the more he seemed scared or upset by a beating, the harder his father would hit him. “If you cried or screamed,” Frank said, “then Dad knew he was hurting you, and it only made him go harder. So I would just cover up and just hold it in. Let him batter on me as much as he wanted. As a result, I got hit less than Gary, because Gary used to really jump and yell and scream. Dad would really go to town on him then. He would go completely off his rocker, and he just wouldn’t stop. He’d keep swinging and swinging and swinging, and Gary kept yelling and crying and begging him to stop, which would only make Dad hit him harder and longer.”
I suspect that what Frank means is that he simply shut down emotionally, though the psychic costs must have proved enormous. Gary, however, couldn’t shut down: The outrage and unfairness of being beat that way became a sticking point in his heart. It was as if, for the rest of his life, he would be reenacting the drama of his father’s punishments with every authority figure he encountered. Years later, when Gary was locked up in prison, he would go out of his way to challenge the dominance of the guards around him. Many of these men were cretinous and brutal, and they would hold Gary down and beat and kick him until his mouth was too bruised to talk and his legs were too sore to stand. Still, he would find a way to stand up and spit at them and call them the foulest names he could muster, knowing full well that they would just beat him again. He would not stop fighting the battle that he knew he could never win.
Once, a generation after their childhood, when my brother Frank was visiting Gary at the Oregon State Penitentiary, Gary told him: “The whole reason I hate authority is because it reminds me so much of Dad. Let’s face it, all those senseless razor strappings the old man gave me did not keep me out of trouble, now did they?”
THOUGH I WOULD LATER see indelible signs of my father’s violence, I never experienced it in the unrestricted way that my brothers did. In fact, I remember being hit by my father on only one occasion. The cause of the spanking is vague—which only goes to support Frank’s belief that all you truly carry away from such an incident is the bitterness of the punishment. I think I probably did something like drawing on a wall with a crayon or sassing my mother, and my father deemed that the act called for a whipping. I remember that he undressed me and stood me in front of him as he unbuckled his belt—a wide, black leather belt with a gleaming silver buckle—and pulled it from around his waist. This whole time he was telling me what my whipping was going to be like, how badly it was going to hurt. I remember I felt absolute terror in those moments— nobody had ever hit me before for any reason, and the dread of what was about to happen felt as fearful as the idea of death itself. My father was going to hit me, and it was going to hurt. It seemed horribly threatening—like the sort of thing I might not live through—and it also seemed horribly unjust.
My father doubled his belt over and held it in his hand. Then he sat down on his chair, reached out and took me by the arm and laid me across his lap. The next part is the only part I don’t recall. I know I got whipped and that I cried out, but I can’t remember a thing about the blows or the pain, or whether it was even truly bad. All I remember is that a few moments later I was standing in front of him again, this time held in my mother’s embrace. “That’s enough, Frank,” she said. “You’ve gone too far. You’re not going to do to this one what you did to the others.” I stood there, looking at my father, rubbing my naked, sore butt, crying. I remember that what had really hurt me was that I felt I had lost my father’s love, that the man I trusted most had hurt me in a way I had never expected. My father was smiling back at me—a smile that was meant to let me know that he was proud with what he had just done, that he enjoyed the power and the virtue of this moment. I looked back at him and I said: “I hate you.”
I know it is the only time I ever said that to him in my life, and I cannot forget what those words did to his face. His smile fell—indeed, his whole face seemed to fall into a painful fear or sense of loss. He laid his belt on his desk and sat studying the floor, with a weary look of sadness.
My mother led me out of the room and dressed my nakedness.
My father never hit me again. After that, he touched me only in love. I realize now I was the only one in the family that he saved that touch for, and to this day I still feel guilty for that singularity.
That was it—the one and only childhood beating I ever received within my family. It might have proved less memorable had it been a weekly occurrence, as it was for my brothers. At the same time, had I been beaten as much as they were—in particular, as much as Gary, whose pain and fear only seemed to gain him especially savage thrashings— there’s a good chance that I also would have ended up as a man who spent his whole life preparing to pull a trigger. When I think of what my brothers went through almost every week of their childhood and young adolescence, the only thing that surprises me is that they didn’t kill somebody when they were still children.
THE DIFFICULTY GARY HAD GOTTEN INTO BACK IN SALT LAKE was a fairly unremarkable sort. “He was doing stuff a lot of kids would do,” said Frank. “The sort of trouble people would talk about for a couple of hours, then forget. They figured he was just a kid growing up.” Chances are, Gary would have found worse trouble in Salt Lake, though he might have had to look a little harder for it. In Portland, trouble was easier to find.
By the early 1950s, Portland had been Oregon’s largest and most important city for more than a century, though it was still groping in many ways to define itself. It didn’t have the sort of history or ambition of other West Coast cities like Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles—in fact, Portland was a town that pointedly decried ambition. The city’s sense of conservatism was a carryover from its earliest days, when its original New England settlers had sought to build a place that would be a refuge of civility and comfort in the midst of the rowdy Northwestern frontier. That attitude of smugness held sway in Portland for several generations, keeping the place hidebound and insular. Consequently, Portland was largely unprepared for the influx of population and the resulting cultural change that followed the end of the Second World War. In the time we settled there, much of Portland still looked and felt like a prewar town that did not want anything to disrupt its heart of fearful pettiness.
Still, a little disruption was inevitable. The postwar sense of release— plus all the new citizenry—had temporarily forced a crack in the city’s Victorian veneer. By day, downtown Portland was still a conventional shopping and business district, though like many American urban centers it was starting to lose its prominence to the outlying suburbs. By night, though, downtown Portland changed its character. Along the main drag of Broadway there was a strip of bustling bars and restaurants, and many of them stayed open all night. Inside these spots, you could find an interesting late-night social life: a mix of Portland’s rich folks and aspiring bohemians, plus a colorful smattering of its would-be criminal types. In the blocks off Broadway, down toward the Willamette River, there were other all-night emporiums, if you knew where to find them. Places like twenty-four-hour movie houses, where the last thing anybody did was watch the movies. Instead, various hustlers worked the patrons, dispensing oral sex or hand jobs for a few dollars, or selling marijuana or harder drugs to the more daring customers. There were also all-night gambling dens and crowded brothels that weren’t shy about servicing teenagers. I wish I could have seen this Portland. It seemed like a somewhat sordid place in those days, instead of the dull and mean town it struggled to become in later years.
The police knew about all these vice dens and tolerated them as long as there was a kic
kback in it for them. At the same time, they never let major organized crime get a foothold in the area, if only because they didn’t want the competition. Eventually, a newspaper-led, politically-motivated morality campaign changed the city’s night life forever. The all-night bars were shut down, the whorehouses were moved to the northwest corner of the city and the around-the-clock movie houses simply became cheap sleeping quarters for drunks and transients. Meantime, the city’s murder rate began to grow. In short, Portland became a lot like other midsized Western towns: a place hell-bent on believing that the darkness of its nights held nothing more provocative than the protected decency of American family life.
The early 1950s were also, of course, the period that saw the rise of juvenile delinquency—the term that many people used to describe the perceived upswing in dissatisfaction and violence among American adolescents. By the middle of the decade, the adventure called rock & roll would come to signify the growing enterprise of youth rebellion, and it would upend American popular culture in ways that it still has not fully accommodated or recovered from. My older brothers were coming of age in the midst of this time, and Gary and Gaylen in particular did more than merely enjoy or consume rebellion; they brought it home. They wore their hair in greasy pompadours and played Elvis Presley and Fats Domino records. They dressed in scarred motorcycle jackets and brutal boots. They smoked cigarettes, drank booze and cough syrup, skipped—and quit—school, and spent their evenings hanging out with girls in tight sweaters, or racing souped-up cars along county backroads outside Portland, or taking part in half-assed small-town gang rumbles. Mostly, they spent their time looking for an entry into a forbidden life—the life they had seen exemplified in the crime lore of gangsters and killers—and more and more, those pursuits became dangerous and scary.
In time, I wanted to be a part of my brothers’ late-night comings and goings, wanted to share in their laughter and friendship. I also remember being frightened of them. They looked deadly—like they were beyond love, like they were bound to hurt the world around them or die trying.
For Gary, none of this would end up as a simple youthful passage. It became instead a sensibility that encased him, like a creature caught in the ice of another age. Gary’s ideal of badness was formed in this time, and for him it would always remain a guiding ethos.
AS I SAID EARLIER, it is tempting to try to find a moment in this story where eveiything went wrong—an instance that gave birth to my family’s devastation, and especially to Gary’s. My mother held to the belief that Gary’s ruin was born during the brief move to Salt Lake, and even my brother Frank believes that something crucial changed in Gary during that period. For my part, I believe that the beatings were a decisive turning point, though I also suspect the simple (and more frightening) truth is, Gary’s fate was finished at about the instant in which my parents conceived him.
Gary himself, though, had his own view of the moment that made all the difference. It’s a strange instance, and it took place during the first year or so that we lived on Johnson Creek. Toward the end of my brother’s life, Larry Schiller—through Gary’s lawyers—asked him: “Is there any one event in your early life that you remember as fateful, that might have totally changed your life?” Gary replied by telling about a time when he was around twelve or thirteen years old and was heading home from parochial school and decided to take a shortcut. He crossed over from 45th Avenue—the long, winding road that connected Johnson Creek Boulevard to the street where his school was—and made his way to the top of the hill that loomed about a block behind our house. Gary started down the hill and hit a thicket of brier bushes, full of blackberries. From the hill’s top, the berry brambles had looked relatively small, but once Gary had entered them he saw they weren’t small at all. Some of the briers had apparently been there for years and formed a tangle of thorns that stretched up the hill’s incline, as much as thirty feet above his head. The farther down the hill Gary went, the more dense the brush became, and he saw that there was no easy path through all the overgrowth.
At first Gary might have climbed back up the hill, but he decided to push on. An hour and a half later, he was hopelessly mired about halfway through the brier patch. He thought about screaming, but it was unlikely anybody would hear him. He figured he could keep pushing on and work his way through, or he could die in this place. Hours later, Gary came out the other side, torn to pieces and bleeding. “I finally got home about three hours late,” he told Schiller, “and my mom said, well, you’re late, and I said, yeah, I took a shortcut.”
When Schiller later related the story to my mother, she said: “And that changed the course of his life, because he figured he could get into things and get out of them? Is that it? That was a dangerous thing for him to do, and it was a dangerous thing for him to think.”
Gary himself told Schiller that the story represented the point at which he became aware that he would never get afraid. “It left me with a distinct feeling,” he said, “like a kind of overcoming of myself.” Of course, whether he knew it or not, my brother was only telling half the truth. By talking about an overcoming of himself, Gary might have meant an ability to surmount his own fear, but I don’t believe that’s something he ever truly accomplished. I saw his face every day in the last week of his life. I knew how to look into his eyes, because I’d been looking into those same eyes throughout my own life, in my mirror. Those eyes would never lose their terror, not for a moment, even when they terrified other people.
The truth is, Gary wasn’t talking about overcoming himself so much as he was talking about having learned to kill or silence the part of himself that needed to cry out in fear or pain. When Gary overcame himself in that manner, he finally found the power to ruin his own life and to extinguish any other life that it might take to effect that destruction.
I went back to Johnson Creek Boulevard during my recent stay in Oregon and found the area greatly changed. Almost nothing is left of the old neighborhood. The dingy, brown house we lived in is long gone, as are all the other dingy houses in the immediate vicinity. They have been torn down and replaced by sprawling industrial constructions. Maybe it’s just as well. Johnson Creek was never much more than a strip of wasteland. Now it’s simply another ugly city boundary road that people drive through as impatiently as possible, to get from one barren place to another. About the only thing that still survives from those days is the stretch of bramble bushes, growing down the backside of the hill above Johnson Creek. Those bushes look as primordial and fateful now as they did forty years ago, and somehow it doesn’t surprise me that nobody has dared to remove them. They still stand, an ugly relic of the moment a boy realized his life was a thicket, and that no matter how much he screamed, nothing would save him from his fear.
AFTER FINISHING OFF their grammar school years at a local Catholic school, my brothers were transferred to Joseph Lane Grade School, where they attended junior high in Portland. Many of the boys who were in the same classes as my brothers would go on to kill or to be murdered. It was that kind of school, that kind of place.
“Joseph Lane had a large population,” said Tom Lyden, one of the men who taught my brothers during that time. Lyden is retired these days, but back in 1952 he was a newly married young man, trying to teach hard boys. “There were nine hundred kids in the school,” he told me one morning at a breakfast diner, not far from the old school, “and as far as I recall, there was only one family among those students that could be called professional—that is, where the head of the family was a doctor or lawyer or had a college education. It was largely a working-class population from out of the state, comprised of families who had come to work in the local shipyards. As a result, Joseph Lane was regarded as one of the two most difficult schools in Portland to teach. It was a physical environment. The kids were physical and the teachers were physical. We spanked kids, though I wouldn’t say we were violent with them.”
Lyden handed me a photograph he had taken of the first class of boys he ta
ught at Joseph Lane. Gary is standing dead center in the group, looking off to one side, his head tilted, and framed with the backlight of the camera’s flash as it radiated off the window behind him. “That’s him right there, with the halo behind him,” Lyden said, laughing lightly. After a moment, he continued: “My first impression of Gary was that he was a quiet boy. He had beautiful handwriting and a clear artistic ability. I think that learning came easy to him. But it wasn’t long before he started getting into trouble, and then he became one of the most disruptive students I’ve ever seen. He had all this innate intelligence and ability, but he refused to develop it. I used to get angrier with him than any other student I had. Whenever I turned around, he was doing something to turn the classroom environment upside down.”
My brother Frank remembers well Gary’s misbehavior. It was something he lived with daily. “Gary was always in fights,” Frank said. “He wouldn’t study. He’d come to school dressed in his leather boots and leather jacket, wearing his hair like Marlon Brando. He’d sit down and go to sleep in class. Sometimes, when we were in different classes, I’d hear a disturbance in the hall and I’d know automatically. I’d hear the teacher out there dragging somebody from the room. I’d go out and it was always Gary that they were taking out. He was always doing something. Sleeping, showing off, telling the teacher to drop dead or something. He didn’t care about anything. He would get the worse grades he could get. He thought it was cute. And there was no need for it, because Gary was a bright guy. He could have been getting the best grades. He humiliated the hell out of me at Joseph Lane. By then I had reached an age where I wasn’t really interested in being a complete fool, and he was.
“One day,” Frank continued, “Gary and a couple of other school toughs pantsed some guy in the school yard. They held him down and pulled his pants and shorts off him and ran them up the flagpole. I didn’t see it happen—if I had, I would have got into a fight with Gary, trying to stop it—but the news of it was all over school. Gary didn’t do it for any reason except to be funny. But I could see right then, there was a cruel streak developing in him. Ripping some poor guy’s shorts off and running them up the flagpole, leaving the guy standing there in his buff, trying to find something to cover himself with. That wouldn’t have been much fun. The guy was a nice guy. He was somebody I got along with.
Shot in the Heart Page 16
