“That’s all it would take. Just like that, she and Dad would be yelling and screaming. And if one of us tried to get them to calm down or save it until after dinner, that just made things worse. Before long, Mom would have picked up some part of the dinner—usually the choicest part, like the roast or a pie, or maybe a plate or kettle—and she’d heave it on the floor or at Dad. Then he’d stomp out, calling her a crazy crack-brained bitch, and the rest of us would be sitting there, with her at the table crying, and the food ruined, and no recourse. I’ll tell you, it could really get to you. It became so damn common that for years I dreaded eating; it would ruin my digestion just to think about it.”
Even on the nights when Gary wasn’t the issue, fights were still the rule. “I got so fearful of those dinners,” said Frank, “that I used to pull my plate up close to me at the edge of the table, and I’d eat nervous and fast. Dad didn’t like it when I did that, and this one time—”
I jumped in, because suddenly I remembered the incident. It was one of the few incidents from around that time that, for one reason or another, I could recall. “Father took your face,” I said, “and shoved it into your plate.”
“You remember that?” Frank said. “You couldn’t have been more than five. But, yeah, that’s exactly what he did. He reached over, grabbed the back of my head and pushed it right down into the beef stew. That’s what we were eating.” Frank paused for a moment, then laughed. “I came up with beef stew, carrots, and potatoes mashed all over my face. I’ve got to laugh now, but at the time I wasn’t laughing. It was humiliating and disrespectful and disastrous. I didn’t finish my meal. I got up and left the table, went and washed up and sat outside. I remember Gaylen coming out afterward, sitting down beside me. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘I wish we could eat a meal once in a while without all this trouble. But they’ll never let us. They’ll always find a way to turn it into a fight, or as an excuse to beat up on us.’ I remember he had tears rolling down his face as he said it.
“I knew what he meant. Jesus, it’s not the way to eat. I mean, there are people out there starving to death, begging to have a meal like this. We’re fortunate enough to have the food and we can’t sit down and eat it because we have two fools that can’t keep their mouths off each other long enough for us to do that. I was bitter as hell about it.”
Frank sighed, and stayed silent for a few moments, looking into the memory of that time. “Dad just had too damn many rules,” he said after a bit. “He’d make ten thousand rules, knowing that nobody could obey them all. That way there was always something he could punch you for. And after MacLaren’s, Gary really loved to trespass on Dad’s authority.”
Gary began missing more and more meals. In many ways, he had already quit our home, and his father’s rules were now something to be refused at any cost.
GARY HAD FOUND HIMSELF quite a life outside the house. As the counselor at MacLaren’s had surmised, Gary’s school relationships didn’t figure much into it. Gary’s new friends were boys whom he had met during his time in reform school, or older and more experienced associates of these friends.
In particular, Gary started keeping company with those who lived by night. In those days, in the lower part of downtown Portland, there was a bar that catered primarily to a homosexual clientele. Because the police didn’t see the customers as a violent or criminally inclined group—and because most vice cops felt stigmatized by having to make gay arrests—it was also rumored as a safe place for teenagers to frequent, as long as their fake ID was credible and they didn’t make trouble. This bar became one of Gary’s favorite hangouts. Though he would later proclaim loud and hard that he had never been involved in the homosexual activities that are common to prison life, I’ve found men who would swear otherwise. I’ve also talked to people who went to this bar with him, who saw him sitting in corner booths, stealing kisses with other young men, or letting the older ones rest a hand on his tight jeans. A man named John used to hang out at the bar, and he took a special interest in Gary and his crowd. John would let the boys bring their girlfriends to his downtown apartment and hold all-night parties, and later, when Gary and some of the others began stealing regularly and needed to hide their goods, John sometimes let them use his place for that too. In exchange for these favors, Gary and the other boys would flip coins, and the loser of the toss would have to suck off John, and sometimes a friend or two of his as well.
Despite his gay flirtations, Gary began to get something of a name for his prowess with young women. Reportedly, they liked the cool way he looked and dressed, and some of them appreciated the ease with which he could come up with not only booze, but also marijuana, cough medicine, and speed tablets. In any case, if a girl went out with Gary, according to some of my brother’s friends, they knew it was a fuck date. That was his reputation. Either they would put out, or they would get stuck out on some far distant road, walking the long and scary walk back to their homes alone. Sometimes, Gary and another friend would make a date with a couple of girls, then they would go steal a car, pick up their dates, and take them out on a rural road. Gary would take one in the front seat while his friend would do the other in the back. Then the girls would climb over the seats and repeat the rite with the other guy. Gary was known as being pretty direct, his friends said. “He didn’t like to waste much time,” according to one crony. “Gary would say something like, ‘Okay, how about letting me fuck that pussy of yours now?’ Most of the girls didn’t mind him talking like that. That’s what they hung out with him for.”
THE NIGHT ACTION started getting heavier. Gary began breaking into pharmacies or other closed stores, looking for drugs, money, and the odd gun. He liked to build up around a thousand dollars or more, buy some new clothes, some drugs and liquor, and then throw parties until dawn. It was the same thing, night after night. Smoking weed, taking girls up to John’s or taking them for a ride, then drinking until everybody passed out. On the nights Gary and his friends couldn’t get women, or when the money ran out, they would burglarize another home or store. In the homes they would look for rings and watches. They always liked seeing how other people lived.
On those evenings when Gary still came home, he had to walk past a large supermarket located up the road from Reed College, on Woodstock Boulevard, about a mile from our house. It was one of my family’s favorite shopping places, and my father had long been regarded as one of the market’s best customers. Once, a few years before, Gary had been caught shoplifting there, and the store manager dragged him by the arm through the store in front of everybody and called my father. My father remained welcome at the market, but Gary was permanently banned. The episode must still have rankled him. Coming home one night, Gary found himself outside the store at closing time. He put a woman’s nylon stocking over his head, walked into the store’s office, and stuck a gun in the manager’s side—the same man who had dragged him by the arm years before. “Unless you want me to put this barrel up your ass,” Gary told the manager, “and then squeeze the trigger, you’ll give me all the money you have in that safe.”
Gary walked out of the store with $18,000 in a grocery bag that night. It held him over for a while. He was never arrested for the robbery. He was never even suspected of it.
ANOTHER NIGHT, GARY was out with a friend named Clyde. They took some pills and went to a Little Richard show. They were celebrating. In an effort to get Gary to straighten up, my father had bought him a used Oldsmobile. This was Gary’s first night with the car. It was a beauty and he was proud as hell of it. Around two in the morning, Gary and Clyde were driving down 82nd Avenue—the main drag on Portland’s east side, and a haven for car lots. Gary’s Olds ran out of gas.
“Shit,” Clyde said, “what do we do now?”
Gary shrugged. “I don’t know.” He looked out the window and saw a used car lot. “I guess we steal another car.”
A few minutes later Gary and Clyde were speeding down 82nd in a 1956 Chevrolet, Gary behind the wheel. They ran a red light,
and a moment later a cop car was on their tail, its red lights flashing.
Gary and Clyde looked at each other. “What do you want to do?” Clyde asked. Gary smiled and said: “Fuck ’em.” Then he hit the gas.
In those days, 82nd Avenue led quickly and easily to the rural roads around Portland—a no-man’s-land then, a no-man’s-land now. Gary headed for one of the country roads, roared onto it, and had the Chevy up to 110 miles per hour. There were three police cars coming up fast behind them. Up ahead, Gary saw a blockade of trucks. He swung wildly around the blockade at the last moment, cleared it, and kept on going. Behind him, two of the cop cars wrecked.
“Hoo, boy!” shouted Clyde. “We’re gangsters.”
A few minutes later Gary heard a sputter. The car was running out of gas. He pulled into a farmhouse driveway, and he and Clyde jumped out. Within moments, fifteen cops were swarming the place, firing warning shots in the air. They grabbed Clyde before he could run or hide, but Gary got away. The next day, trying to save her brother’s ass, Clyde’s sister told the police: “You can find Gary Gilmore staying at a fruiter’s place in downtown Portland.” She gave them John’s address.
Gary and Clyde stayed in the county jail for a few weeks and were remanded to adult court. Clyde was scared as hell, but Gary seemed to be taking it in stride. His confidence paid off. My father hired a good lawyer—one of Portland’s best political attorneys—who somehow got Gary off with one-year probation. Even got the other kid off too. It was back to the good times.
SOONER OR LATER, something had to give.
It happened on a hot summer night, in the middle of July 1957. Gary and Clyde had been out late, looking for the usual fun, the usual trouble. They were coming from a party on the east side, where they had been smoking weed all night, and were walking along 52nd Avenue, near Division. At about 2:30 A.M., they passed an office building. Gary looked around the streets. They were empty and silent in all directions. “Let’s hit this building,” Gary said. They found a loose window, jimmied it, climbed in. Moments later Gary was going through a desk when he came across a .32 automatic. The gun was loaded and already cocked, but Gary didn’t know.
There was a big drugstore down the street. Gary and Clyde decided to go rob it. Walking down Division, Clyde said to Gary: “C’mon, Gary, you’ve never robbed anybody with a gun before.”
“I have too,” said Gary. “I robbed a grocery store over by Mom and Dad’s house.”
“Oh, bullshit. Show me how you’d rob somebody.”
“Like this,” said Gary. He turned around, aimed the gun at Clyde’s midsection, pulled the trigger.
Clyde saw blue flame come from the end of the gun, and felt a burning sensation in his stomach. “Aw, man, you shot me,” Clyde said, and fell down.
Gary looked at Clyde a moment, then ran down the street.
A little while later, Clyde heard two more shots. “Jesus Christ,” he thought, “what’d Gary do—kill somebody, or shoot himself?”
Clyde managed to get up, make it to the street corner and flag down a passing taxi. Told the driver he’d been shot, and to take him to a hospital. When they got to the emergency room, Clyde told the driver: “I’m broke.”
“You fucking punk,” the driver said, and took off.
An hour later, Clyde’s mother was at the hospital and so were the cops. Clyde wouldn’t say how he’d got shot or who had done it. His mother turned to an officer and said: “Why don’t you check out Gary Gilmore? This looks like something he would do.”
NO MATTER HOW MUCH Clyde’s family insisted, he would not press charges against Gary for shooting him. “I would have done the same thing,” he said later. “I would’ve thought, ‘Hell, I killed the guy. Better take off.’”
It pissed off the police, but they could still hold both of the kids on burglary charges. Once again, they remanded Gary to adult court. This time, a good lawyer couldn’t help. He was sentenced to one year in Rocky Butte, the Multnomah County Jail. It was his first real jail time. He was sixteen years old.
AGAIN, I HAVE BEEN TELLING you stories that do not come from my own memory. They have been passed on to me either by the oral tradition of my family, or by witnesses, or by interviews or documents of one sort or another. Gary isn’t somebody who comes back to me that much through my own memory—or at least not through the memories of my childhood. To be truthful, I don’t remember Gary as somebody I saw around our house on a daily basis, like my parents or other brothers. I remember him more as somebody who was talked about—a sort of distant force, whose activities outside the home had a tremendous impact on our peace of mind, like a storm, always looming outside the door.
My mother told me Gary used to hold me on his lap when I was a toddler, that he loved playing with me. She also told me that he used to enjoy taking me downtown with him when he went shopping for school supplies or clothes, that he would usually bring me back loaded down with new loot he had bought for me with his own allowance. When my mother pointed out to him that he had just spent all his money on an already over-indulged child, Gary would laugh. It seemed he got a kick out of the idea that a small kid had actually conned him. I have to take my mother’s word for these stories. I simply have no memory of any of these occasions.
I clearly remember only a handful of incidents involving Gary from my early childhood. Here are a couple of them:
One morning—probably during Gary’s stretch of freedom between MacLaren’s and the county jail—my mother told me to go wake him up. He was going to be late for school. I ran up the stairs and opened the door to my brothers’ bedroom. Gary was sitting up in bed. On his right side was a girl with black hair, naked. She was bent over him, her head over his lap, bobbing up and down. On his left was another girl, with long brown hair. She was on her knees and she had one of her breasts in his mouth. Gary looked up and saw me, then tapped the girl with black hair on her head. She stopped sucking my brother and then settled down on the pillow next to him. “This is my little brother Mike,” Gary said. The girls giggled, and the one with the black hair made a beckoning gesture. “Hi, Mike,” she said. “Want to join us?” Then she shimmied her large breasts for me. I still remember the oval shape of her dark brown nipples.
“Do me a favor, partner,” Gary said. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad about this. Tell them I wasn’t here.”
I nodded, then ran down and found my mother. I told her Gary had two girls in bed with him. I don’t know why I did it. I always wanted my brothers to like me. Looking back, I figure I just had to tell somebody, and she was the first person I came across. It’s the only time I remember my mother ever being truly mad at Gary. She went into the kitchen and told my father. I remember that my father laughed. “Aw, hell,” he said. “He’s just being a boy.” He went up and talked to the girls in soothing tones. Got everybody dressed, put them in the car, and drove them away.
The other incident I remember vividly took place on a Christmas night—maybe the Christmas after MacLaren’s, but more likely a year or two later. This holiday night I was sitting in my room, playing with the day’s trove of presents, when Gary wandered in. “Hey, Mike, how you doing?” he asked, taking a seat on my bed. “Think I’ll just join you while I have a little Christmas cheer.” He had a six-pack of beer with him, and he was speaking in a bleary drawl. “Look, partner,” he continued, “I want to have a talk with you.” It was probably the first companionable statement I remember him making to me. But what followed was an intimacy I had never expected and could not really fathom at such a young age. Sitting on the end of my bed, sipping at his Christmas beer, Gary stared off into some harsh, private place and told me horrible, transfixing stories. Stories about the boys he knew in the detention halls and reform schools where he now spent much of his time—stories about the hard boys who had taught him the merciless codes of his new life, and about the soft boys who did not have what it took to survive that life.
And then Gary imparted to me one of the few lessons I remember ever hearing
from him. “You have to learn to be hard,” he said. “You have to learn to take things and feel nothing about them. No pain, no anger, nothing. And you have to realize, if anybody wants to beat you up, even if they want to hold you down and kick you, you have to let them. You can’t fight back. You shouldn’t fight back. Just lie down in front of them and let them beat you, let them kick you. Lay there and let them do it. It is the only way you will survive. If you don’t give in to them, they will kill you.”
He set aside his beer and reached out and cupped my face in his hands. “You have to remember this, Mike,” he said. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll be a man. Promise me you’ll let them beat you.” We sat there that winter night, staring at each other, my face in his hands, and as Gary asked me to promise to take my beatings, his bloodshot eyes began to cry. It was the first of only two times I would ever see him shed tears. And then I promised him: Yes, I’ll let them kick me. But I was afraid even as I said it—afraid of actually taking a beating from anyone, and afraid of betraying Gary’s plea.
Shot in the Heart Page 21
