“One day,” Frank continued, “Ron came to me and said: ‘I’ve decided that this religion is right, and I’m going to dedicate my life to it.’ He said, ‘You and me got one more month of going down the street to where the prostitutes live. At the end of that time, I’m straightening my life out.’ So Ron and me went down there and we’d have our fun. We drank and did things. And at the end of the month, Ron lived up to his word. He became a Jehovah’s Witness and he stopped. He’d still come over and visit with me, because we remained good friends, and he really wanted me to come into the organization with him. I wouldn’t do it. But he did talk Mom into having a six-month study with him. She loved to argue over religion. I would sit in the next room and listen to them, because I didn’t want anything to do with it. And Mom, of course, would not accept any of it. She’d say, ‘That guy, he’s getting worse every week.’ But at the end of the time, I was convinced from sitting in the other room and listening to what he said, that Ron was right. And I told Mom. I said, ‘I like this; I’m going to take it up.’ Mom got really mad at Ron at this point. She went to the Mormon church and had the local bishop come over and talk to me. He told me that what the Jehovah’s Witnesses taught was wrong. He said it was better for me to remain a Catholic than become a Witness, because Mormons and Catholics both believed Christ died for your sins, so that when you die you can go to heaven, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe that. I was polite to Mom and the bishop, but I told them: ‘This is what I believe.’ And I stayed with it. I started subscribing to the Witnesses’ magazine, started going to their meetings. I was nineteen years old when I finally accepted it.”
There are a lot of things about Frank’s story that I like. In particular, I like the idea of these two kids who were thoughtful and conscientious enough to care about salvation, but who were also smart and lustful enough to make sure they squeezed in a few good sins before it was too late.
What I like better, though, is that the story also says that Frank knew there were limits worth knowing. There were limits to how much he should risk his soul for indulgence, and there were also limits to how much he owed his family. By choosing a religion that neither my mother nor father could adhere to, Frank Jr. was making plain that he didn’t want to live according to their construction of the world and its worth— that he wanted to find his own path. It was his way of saying he was no longer duty-bound to the family. He had now envisioned a better home, a better life, and he was waiting for the day he could make it his own.
GAYLEN’S STORY IS ANOTHER matter, and trying to tell it raises some peculiar problems for me. Aside from my father, Gaylen—who was born as Gaylen Noel Gilmore—was the only member of my family who was never interviewed at one time or another about his life. In addition, I could find few witnesses or sources willing or able to fill in the missing chunks and secrets. Consequently I have little testimony from which to reconstruct him, except for the narrative of my own memory and the memories of my brother Frank and my cousin Brenda. What’s troubling about all this isn’t that I don’t have interviews or sources about my brother’s life, but rather that I should feel I even need such a thing so that I can tell his story. After all, I did grow up with Gaylen—I fought with him, laughed with him, resented him, and mourned him. I should know him—and if you had asked me at the outset of this project, I would have said that I thought I knew Gaylen better than I knew almost anybody else in my family.
But it wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t know any of these people as well as I should and that I might never know them well enough. There were simply too many spaces between me and my brothers, and Gaylen, like Gary, was somebody who was gone from our home a lot— either in jail or halfway across the country or carousing in the night, looking for the same forbidden rapture that we all ended up looking for. There is only so much I know about what went on during Gaylen and Gary’s absences from our home—and, of course, it is in the space of those absences that the two of them tried to make or remake their lives. In other words, it was in their private lives away from the scrutiny of my family that they pursued their biggest desires, committed their worst sins, and felt their worst fears, and whatever those experiences were, their memory and meaning died along with my brothers. Maybe that’s for the better. Maybe I should know only so much about those secrets.
Still, I’ll never stop wondering. I look at what happened to Gaylen’s life and I know that I am looking at another mystery—one that I feel especially disturbed by. If it is true that the way a person dies can sometimes tell us truths about the way the person lived, then I know this much: Gaylen lived with horrible wounds that could not be healed, but they weren’t what killed him. What killed him were the things he could not stop doing to himself.
I have never missed anybody in the world as much as I miss Gaylen. Not my parents. Not Gary. Not even the woman I thought could take the place of them all. If I could choose one lost person to spend one more hour with in my life, Gaylen would be that person. I would ask him to solve the mystery, and tell what it was that made him obliterate himself.
GAYLEN WAS PROBABLY THE brother I had the most combustible relationship with. I know that we played together as children. I can see that from some of my father’s photos, and I can even recall it, in a fuzzy way. But even in the best of families, the fraternity between us could not have been that easy, given the gap in our ages. By the time I was six, Gaylen was twelve. He was already discovering the wonderful passions and anxieties that come with adolescence, and a kid who reads J. D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac, and who is on the brink of sex and rock & roll, does not want to be caught lingering in the world of Disney. When I would beg Gaylen to take me downtown to see a film like Darby O’Gill and the Little People, he would instead take me to see something like Suddenly Last Summer, a Tennessee Williams story about a cruel family, cursed by God and its own demons. When the movie would get too talky for me and I started to complain. Gaylen would say: “Be quiet and sit still or you’ll miss the leprechaun scene that’s coming up.”
By the time my memory really takes hold, I remember Gaylen as somebody who not only pulled tricks on me, but also was one of the more hostile forces in my childhood. Some of the strain between us had to do with the relationship we each had with my father. For years, Gaylen had been my father’s favorite son. He was a good-looking, exceptionally bright and charming boy—the one, before me, that my father kept closest to him. But as Gaylen grew older, he began to grow strong in his own ideas, and he also began to develop a quick and nasty temper. My father saw these developments as signs of willfulness and insubordination, and he started beating Gaylen in the same way he beat Frank Jr. and Gary. Also, around age thirteen, Gaylen began putting on a little weight—a brief period of fattening out, before he turned rail-thin for the rest of his life—and my father would make fun of this gain, blaming it on an uncurbed appetite. If Gaylen had a second helping of food at the dinner table, my father ridiculed his request. “Where are you going to fit that?” my father asked. “In your leg? I think your gut’s too fat to take much more.”
The rupture that developed between Gaylen and my father was exactly that: a rupture. My father’s relationship with Gary had always been bad, but Gaylen had once known my father’s love. Now, as his position of favor was displaced by me, Gaylen came to know rejection and mockery, and he could not hide the hurt and fury he felt over this. As a result, I sometimes became the target of his anger—like the time he pushed me down a flight of stairs in our home, the same way that Gary had once thrown him off our back porch, or the many occasions he twisted my arm behind my back, to secure my promise to keep one of his increasingly illicit secrets. I remember my father punishing Gaylen once by taking something from Gaylen that Gaylen wanted very much—I think it was one of his pearl-handled, nickel-plated toy six-shooters—and giving it to me. A day or two later, after my father left town on work, Gaylen dragged all my toy guns out in the side yard and locked me in the house. I watched out the dining-room
window as my brother smashed toy after toy with an ax. He tossed the shattered heap of plastic in the trash can, and when he came back in, he was crying. “Someday,” he said in a voice thick with pain, “he’ll hate you too. Just wait.”
My worst memory of any of the incidents during this time involved both Gaylen and Gary, and it took place on a Christmas Day. I don’t remember where the fight started, but at some point my father and Gary were embroiled in an ugly confrontation. They were each daring the other’s toughness, and then they started threatening to kill each other. My mother was pleading with them to stop, but the moment was too tense to get between them. Finally, Gaylen stepped in and asked my father to leave Gary alone. My father—who was already an old man but still amazingly strong—doubled his fist and punched Gaylen in the stomach. I have never forgotten that moment—the sheer awfulness of that blow. Gaylen doubled over in pain and hurt shock, and Gary went over to help him. My father grabbed me and said that we were leaving—that we would spend Christmas in a hotel. This time, though, I did not want to go, and I said so. “Don’t you turn against me too,” he said, and the look of rage on his face was enough to make me go with him. I was afraid of what he might do to us all if I stayed.
My mother begged my father to remain, to apologize to Gaylen and Gary and try to repair the Christmas, or at least to let me spend the holiday with my brothers. My father would hear none of it. As he and I were in the car, pulling out of the driveway, I looked up at my mother and brothers gathered on the porch, watching us leave. I could tell from the way my brothers were looking at me that they would never forgive me this moment, that they would never let me into their fraternity after this.
Pulling out of that driveway, I felt like a traitor. I wanted to join my brothers—to be standing with them on that porch, watching as the source of their hurt left them.
One afternoon a few months later, Gaylen led me out on the back porch and told me he had a present for me. He handed me a small package wrapped in white tissue, with a red ribbon around it. I was thrilled. I loved presents. I undid the ribbon and pulled off the outer wrapping. Inside was a small, odd-shaped object—about the size of one of those prizes that were common at the time in cereal boxes—and this item was also wrapped. I unfolded the inner package, and inside was my present: a hardened clump of dog shit. Gaylen laughed when he saw the stricken look on my face and said: “Don’t be such a crybaby. And don’t tell Mom and Dad. If you do, I’ll pound the living hell out of you.” I sat on the porch, looking at my present, feeling like my brothers must hate me. After a while, I threw the gift away and went and sat under the backyard tree for hours. That was the first time I remember thinking that someday I would leave them all behind.
WHEN MY FATHER WOULD QUARREL with Gaylen, he would accuse my brother of following Gary’s course. “You’re turning into a cheap, no-good crook, just like your brother.”
It is true that as Gaylen became disinherited of my father’s love, he tried to become possessed of crime. Whereas Gary acted on almost every criminal impulse he had, Gaylen got stuck in contemplating the idea of the criminal life. He lived the ideal enough to impress a few friends and women—and enough to get thrown in jail several times—but he didn’t live it in the constantly threatening, deadly way that Gary did. Gary committed the deed; Gaylen loved the thought. In the end, violence took them both: the murderer and the murdered.
In part, Gaylen’s fascination with criminals was simply the pose of a smart, rebellious youth, adopting decided antiheroes as a way of setting himself apart from the easy values of the culture around him—a common-enough stance among certain young people in the 1950s and ’60s. In particular, Gaylen liked to talk about the idea of the perfect crime, much the same way that another kid might talk about setting a new sports record, or another might dream about writing a great book or great music. Gaylen kept reading his books of poetry, but he also started bringing home books about famous crimes—such as the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. Gaylen was thrilled by the case, and he talked about it often. At the peak of Colonel Lindbergh’s fame, somebody sneaked into his Hopewell, New Jersey, mansion and stole his twenty-month-old son, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The kidnapper left behind a note, demanding fifty thousand dollars in exchange for the boy’s return. Lindbergh paid the ransom, but the child was not returned. A few weeks later, the baby’s body was found in a grove of woods not far from the Lindbergh home. He had been dead since the night of the kidnapping. There was a famous trial—of Bruno Hauptmann, a German immigrant caught in possession of some of the ransom money—and there was also a famous execution. Four years after the kidnapping, Hauptmann was electrocuted in the electric chair at New Jersey State Prison, while souvenir hawkers sold models of the chair and replicas of the kidnap ladder to cheering mobs outside. But the mystery and appeal of the case did not die with Hauptmann, and to many observers, something felt unfinished or unsolved about the whole affair. After studying the case, Gaylen became convinced that Bruno Hauptmann died an innocent man—that some other party had committed the kidnapping and murder and had gotten away with it. Gaylen studied the details of the case for weeks and weeks, like an aspiring artist studying a masterpiece, trying to understand or assimilate the genius in the pattern of the work.
Gaylen was also intrigued by the infamous Leopold and Loeb case. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two brilliant University of Chicago students who had come from families of great wealth and status. Both were fascinated with Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman, and both had been subjected to intense acts of sexual abuse at early ages. In 1924, Leopold and Loeb talked a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks into entering their car. Loeb stabbed the boy to death in the back seat with a chisel. The two college students then had dinner, and later that night they stripped the dead boy of his clothes, poured acid on his face to prevent his identification, and buried him in a drainpipe, near a Chicago swamp. They went on to demand a ransom from the boy’s worried parents. The idea had been to commit a perfect crime, an outrageously offensive act that could not be solved, though they ended up leaving several telltale clues. The idea also was not to feel anything about the deed—to murder the child without compunction or guilt. It was this last aspect of the Leopold-Loeb story that intrigued Gaylen the most. “They didn’t want to feel a thing about what they did,” he told me once. “They thought they were superior men, and that superior men had a right to kill weaker people for the pleasure or experience of killing.”
When I was younger and Gaylen used to talk to me about these infamous crimes—or when he disclosed that the first girl he ever fell in love with was actress Patty McCormack, because of her performance as little Rhoda, the child who blithely killed anybody who got in her way in The Bad Seed—I would tell myself that Gaylen was not as bad as the people he pondered. I told myself he was studying evil so he would not commit it himself—that if he allowed himself to entertain horrible crimes in his mind, then he would not have to perform them in his life. Maybe I was right, because Gaylen’s reported crimes never amounted to very much— petty thievery and bad checks were about as bad as he got. That, plus a bad habit of fucking his best friends’ wives. I’d like to think Gaylen was too moral or concerned ever to murder somebody, or commit the sort of act of ruin that forever costs another person his or her hope or happiness. And, since he apparently never did commit such acts, I’d like to think it’s because the better part of him won out. Or, if Gaylen did ever pull off the perfect crime, then he also found a way to keep quiet about it— though I think he was probably too much of a drunk to stay quiet about any such thing for long.
I guess I’m not making him seem too appealing here. In truth, Gaylen was a charming, funny, incredibly bright and talented person—easily the best writer the family produced. But Gaylen also had a mean and fairly ruthless side to him, and as far as I can tell, both his good and ugly parts emerged from the same place in his heart. Gaylen wanted the importance and sanction he had once known in
childhood, when my father had treated him with love and favor. When the love between them became contorted into hatred, all of Gaylen’s internal reality got upended. The person he had loved most now regularly hurt him in shameless and cruel ways. Such a twist in the world might not only cause you to hate the person you once loved—it might even be enough to make you want to hate and mock the signs and values of love itself.
In any event, crime and darkness weren’t Gaylen’s only obsessions. True, he dreamed of monsters, but he also dreamed of a love that might help him rise above himself. I know, because I saw both the monsters and the hope in the poems that he eventually wrote. Gaylen’s poetry was really something—it spoke about devastation as both choice and fate, about being on life’s outside, headed for a self-willed, expiatory inferno, and it was full of passionate rhythms and startling turns of phrase. Gaylen was proud of the two hundred or so poems he had written, but then one night, when a bitter fight with the woman he loved had resulted in her walking out on him, he opened up a bottle of peppermint schnapps and sat up into the dark hours of morning reading his poems, one after the other. When he was done, he poured the remainder of the schnapps on his sheaf of poems and set them on fire, swearing he would never write another poem until the woman loved him again and he could write something worthy of her. Later, as Gaylen died his painful death, the woman sat beside him in the hospital. When the nurse cleaned out my brother’s nightstand, she found a scribbled poem that Gaylen had been working on, about the difficulties of an impossible love—the last thing he ever wrote. Its opening lines were: “A story can’t be told/Until a story’s done.”
Shot in the Heart Page 25
