Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  BUT I’M GETTING TOO FAR ahead of things here. Gaylen’s troubles seemed to begin when he was about twelve or thirteen and he started cutting school, sneaking off to hang out in Johnson Creek’s woods with other truant kids. Like Gary, he took to dressing in motorcycle jackets and tried adopting the looks of James Dean and Elvis Presley. (Later, when Gaylen lost his weight, he sometimes looked a good deal like a younger Elvis.) He also took to smoking and drinking. More upsetting to my father, though, was when Gaylen began stealing. Stealing, like drinking, became one of Gaylen’s constants. If my father left any money on his desk or in his pants, Gaylen would take it and then lie about the theft. If he saw something he wanted in a store—a sharp-looking model car, say, or a stylish sport shirt—he would look for a way to lift the item without being caught. If that wasn’t possible, he’d take something from around our home and sell it to a pawnshop. My mother lost many of her nice clocks and prize keepsakes that way. Looking back, I see now that Gaylen was hungry all the time. He wanted everything and he wanted it in a hurry, without working for it. Like somebody who didn’t have much time.

  The drinking, though, was the worst part of it. My brother Frank thinks Gaylen started drinking when he was about twelve and never gave it up after that.

  One time, my mother and I took the bus home to Portland from Seattle, and when Gaylen opened the door to help my mother with her luggage, he was completely bald. My mother just about fainted. She stood staring at his gleaming, round dome, as Gaylen tried to act nonchalant, and her mouth made several motions before she could form words. “What the hell have you done to your hair?” she finally blurted. Gaylen explained that he’d wanted a fashionable Mohawk cut, like many of the tougher kids were starting to wear. A day or two before, he and a friend had several beers and began shaving and trimming each other’s hair. His friend, it seemed, couldn’t quite get the lines straight, as he tried to shave my brother’s hair into a hedgerow, and after a few passes, Gaylen finally got pissed and flat-out drunk and ended up shaving everything off. “You are not going to be seen in public with me looking like that,” my mother announced. “You better get used to wearing a baseball hat or stocking cap or some damn thing until your hair grows out, because what you’ve done looks hideous.” I don’t remember her saying a word to him about his drinking.

  Not long after that, I was sitting in the living room watching television, when Gaylen walked through the front door. He was still bald-headed. On this day, he was also bare-chested, and from his head to his waist he was covered in jots and rivulets of blood. He had wanted to join a local gang, and for the initiation the ganglord had my brother stripped and tied up, then shot repeatedly with a pellet rifle—or at least that’s the story I remember hearing. Gaylen sat in a chair at the kitchen table as my mother washed the blood from him and picked the pellets from his arms and chest. She was crying and talking about calling the police, but Gaylen made her promise she wouldn’t. He said he would take care of it on his own. He didn’t look scared, simply coldly determined. Some time later, we heard that the teenage ganglord had been assaulted in an alley and badly injured by a BB shot to his eye. It all made a certain kind of sense.

  But that’s not what I remember most about the affair. What I remember most is this: When I saw my brother walk through the door, blood running in thin stripes down his almost naked body, I knew I was seeing something both frightening and thrilling. In a way, I wanted to be him— to be able to walk with that kind of poise and determination, as the blood ran off my skin. To bleed, and be able to act as if it didn’t hurt a bit.

  EVENTUALLY, GAYLEN’S DEFIANCE became as full-blown as Gary’s. “As you know,” Frank said, “Dad always had a thousand rules, and one of them was that you had to be in at a certain time at night or he locked the door and you stayed out. Ten o’clock, I think it was. Gaylen, though, would make it a point to come in about 10:30 or 11 P.M., and of course the door was locked by that time. He would stand out there drunk, screaming and pounding on the door, yelling to Mom and Dad to open up. And Dad would open the door—usually with his foot flying or his fists swinging, and there would be a big hell-raising. The neighbors used to say you could hear it all the way down the street.

  “I remember thinking, ‘Things are bad enough with Gary. Now we have two trouble-raisers around the house, and Mom and Dad to boot.’ After that, between Gary and Gaylen, there was never a moment’s peace in our home.”

  DURING THE SAME PERIOD that I am writing about here, Gary was serving his year at Rocky Butte Jail for burglarizing the office where he stole the pistol. He was discharged in May 1958 and somehow managed to get his job back at Bresse Appliances. Throughout this time there was the usual flurry of nocturnal misadventure—a car theft or two, probably more burglaries—but for a while, my father’s money managed to keep Gary from a quick return to jail.

  Then, there was the incident with the underage woman. Let’s call her Anita.

  I got this story from a couple of different sources. On the interview tapes that Larry Schiller loaned me, during the last forty-eight hours of Gary’s life, one of his attorneys asked him, “Are you sure you don’t have any kids?” Gary responded: “I don’t think so. I had one kid, but he died … That was a long time ago, in Portland … He died when he was born.” I was jolted when I heard this—it was complete news to me—but the subject was finished as soon as it had come up. Gary had nothing more to say on the matter.

  A few months later, I was poring over Gary’s arrest and trial records from Multnomah County, when I came across an indictment for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, as well as rape. From what I could tell, it looked like Gary and another young man probably got an underage woman or two drunk and then seduced them, but I couldn’t be sure it was that cut-and-dried. Later, I got in touch with the man who had been Gary’s codefendant in the matter—a man I’ll call Richard—and he consented to meet with me and tell me the circumstances of the event.

  One morning, as heavy rain fell on Portland, Richard showed up at my door. He was a handsome, gray-bearded man, about fifty-two, and in contrast to many of Gary’s friends I would meet, there was nothing about him that seemed hardened or weary. Instead, he seemed like a friendly and decent family man. As it happened, his experience with Gary had proved a turning point in his life. Richard first met Gary, he told me, when they were both working at Bresse Appliances. “There was a kind of aloofness to your brother,” Richard said, as we sat and talked over coffee. “It was as if he were partly shy and partly scared—like everything was just too new for him. I felt a kind of kinship for that. I was sort of lonely in those days, and I’d always had a bit of a hearing problem. It had made it difficult for me to make new friends easily, because I was self-conscious about it. Anyway, I decided to befriend your brother. I’d try to help him along—show him where things were and how they worked—and we’d go out for a drink now and then.

  “I had an apartment on 23rd and Weidler, in northeast Portland. I met a couple of girls who lived about three or four blocks from my apartment. They had a habit of coming over on weekends. Sometimes, one of them would stay late. We’d have a few drinks and I would proceed to do what young guys do.

  “This one Tuesday morning,” Richard continued, “Gary and I had both been on swing shift at Bresse, and Gary had sacked out at my place. Early in the morning, the girls knocked on the front door and got us both up. They had their younger sister with them. She was about fourteen years old. She was on her way to grade school and the other two girls were on their way to high school, and they had to catch a bus over on Broadway someplace. The two older girls figured they could still get to school on time, but the young girl—Anita—didn’t want to leave. So the older girls left, and Anita and Gary and I sat around and talked and played cards. I kept telling her she better be going home because we had to go to work at about three-thirty. After a while, the day wore on and Gary says, ‘Well, maybe I won’t go to work today.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ but I remember thinking,
‘Hell, this isn’t right.’ But there’s no arguing with Gary, so I jumped in the car and went to work.

  “When I came home, Anita was passed out drunk in the middle of the bed. All she had on was a thin slip, and Gary was nowhere around. I let her sleep because it was one o’clock in the morning and she was out of it—she couldn’t wake up. I just sat in my chair and dozed a little bit. I woke her the next morning and told her to get dressed and go home. Naturally, I knew there was going to be something bad coming down about this, so I just waited for it to happen. The following morning, bangity-bang-bang on the front door. It was the police, and they had a warrant for my arrest.

  “They threw me against the wall and handcuffed me, then threw me in the car and took me downtown and put me in jail. My brother read about my arrest in the paper and made bail, and I told him what the story was. Then I got in touch with the girls to find out what had happened. I learned that the mother wanted to press charges. She said her daughter had been raped, or some doggone thing. Actually, I think Gary had seduced her, but given her age, it was the same as rape. And because it had happened at my place, it left me holding the bag. Finally, the girls came forward and testified that I had nothing to do with it and, of course, I had to give up Gary’s name in order to save my own skin.”

  A few days later, the police arrested Gary at our home on Johnson Creek. They took him to the city jail in downtown Portland and began interrogating him and Richard in adjoining rooms, trying to get their accounts straight. Once, for a few moments, the officers left Gary alone so they could go check out one of his statements with Richard. Gary moved a stool over beneath a half-open overhead window, jumped and grabbed the window frame and hauled himself up and out. He dropped twenty feet out the window to the ground below and took off running. The police didn’t catch him.

  Eventually, Gary got revenge on Richard for turning him in. Richard came home one night to find that a guitar and radio had been stolen, as well as a rare railroad pocket watch—Richard’s only memento of his deceased father. Later, he heard that Gary had stolen the things. Richard got the guitar back—warped beyond repair—but despite searching all the city’s pawnshops, he never found the watch. When he came to see me that winter morning, he was hoping I might somehow have it for him. Unfortunately, I did not.

  “I guess I’d been gullible about Gary,” Richard said, before saying good-bye. “Looking for friends, I was a pretty easy touch, and I figured that Gary needed friendliness as much as I did. But Gary didn’t keep our friendship. I would never have violated a friend’s home and trust the way Gary violated mine.”

  GARY HEADED OUT FOR CALIFORNIA and made it all the way to San Diego. There, he stayed with an old girlfriend and changed his name. He was now John Rohr. His life in San Diego wasn’t much different than it had been in Portland. In a single month in San Diego and Los Angeles, he managed to get arrested on five different occasions—everything from driving without a license to stealing liquor. Gary headed on to Texas, where he was picked up for vagrancy. The El Paso Police figured out that John Rohr was really Gary Gilmore, wanted back in Oregon for rape. They shipped him home.

  Gary was initially charged with rape, but there had been a complication: The young woman had ended up pregnant. According to what my mother told others, my father offered to pay the hospital costs and a few years of child support in exchange for the dropping of the rape charge. The family and prosecutors agreed, as long as Gary never contacted the woman again or attempted to see her child. In mid 1960, the woman delivered a baby boy. (I do not know his name, nor have I tried to learn it.) My mother later told somebody she had once visited the family and held the baby on her lap. Soon, the girl and her family left Oregon, though my mother stayed in periodic contact with her. The baby boy, contrary to what Gary believed, had not died. “I don’t think Gary loved the woman,” my mother said, “but he probably would have loved the child. It was better for him to think he was dead and not ever try to see him.”

  Gary still ended up getting a year for larceny, on an old car-theft charge, and in September 1960 he was remanded to the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem—also known as OSCI: the midway step between county jail and adult state prison. In his intake interview, Gary said of his father: “I don’t really know him too good. He treats me like I ask to be treated.” And of his mother: “A pretty fine woman, lets me have my own way. She thinks I’m old enough to make up my own mind and never interferes. She respects my judgment.” At the same time, he said he had never confided in either parent, nor in anyone else for that matter. “It would embarrass me to do so.” In the accompanying psychological profile, the interviewer noted: “Gilmore operates on the pleasure-pain principle and his personality structuring remains predicated to the infantile concept of self-gratification. Underlying this is a destructive interfamilial history where the mother was ineffectual and the father domineering and openly hostile toward authority … Dynamically, then, this is an inmate who had developed under the tutelage of a father who was himself unable to accept the authoritarian role. Gilmore had undoubtedly identified closely with these trends and it is noticed that his arrest record is elaborate… Gilmore may be seen as a character disorder.” The writer also made note of Gary’s clear artistic skills and his high scores in scholastic tests. It added up to a troubling profile: an extremely bright kid, hell-bent on doing dumb and self-destructive things.

  Following Gary’s intake, OSCI’s superintendent wrote to Texas seeking my brother’s birth records. What he got back was a letter stating that they had no birth record for a Gary Gilmore; however, on the same date, a Faye Robert Coffman had been born in McCamey to a Frank Walter Coffman and Dessie Brown—names that were apparently aliases for my parents. The superintendent wrote my parents, asking them to clarify the matter, but my parents refused to reply. My father was never going to reveal to anybody the truth behind either his use of the name Coffman or the circumstances of that Southern trip, and my mother acted as if the whole thing had never happened. Despite repeated requests from OSCI, my parents offered no explanations.

  The superintendent had a resident sociologist ask Gary about the matter. Gary told the sociologist he had no idea what he was talking about and asked to be taken back to his cell. Over the next few nights, Gary began to have severe headaches. It was the beginning of his lifelong bout with migraines—a problem that also afflicted Frank Jr., Gaylen, and myself. Over the years, Gary’s migraines became so chronic and disabling that prison authorities sent him to hospitals on several occasions to try to determine the cause of the headaches. Nobody ever found the cause, and nobody ever found the cure. Thirty years later, Gary’s girlfriend Nicole told me she remembered my brother walking out into their backyard in Spanish Fork, Utah, and pounding his head against a tree to try to mask the pain.

  The question about his birth name began to bother Gary more and more. He visited the sociologist on several occasions to discuss the matter. At first, Gary denied the documentation could be correct, until he saw a copy of the certificate. Gary, however, refused to discuss the question with my parents. Neither he nor my father ever let on to the other that either one knew about the false name, and it would be several years before Gary discussed the subject with my mother, during the last day of his freedom that the two of them would ever spend together.

  THESE WERE THE PATTERNS OF LIFE on Johnson Creek as I remember them: my parents fighting relentlessly, my father dragging me all around the Pacific Northwest. My brothers coming and going, living lives outside the home that I could not figure out and could not take part in.

  In all this time, there was only one common pleasure that my father and Gary and Gaylen and myself all shared. On Tuesday and Friday nights, my father would take the entire family to the professional wrestling matches, held in Portland’s Armory Stadium and Civic Auditorium. Professional wrestling was as phony and flamboyant then as it is now—all ludicrous ballet, no real risk—but we loved it. We’d sit ringside, and my father and brothe
rs would cheer the heroes and hiss the villains, and I would cheer and hiss along with them. Meantime, my mother and Frank Jr. would sit many rows behind us, trying to look demure and unrelated, as the rest of us did our best to outgeek what was almost certainly the Northwest’s geekiest sports audience.

  There was one villain in particular we all hated, a chubby but muscular guy who wore a fierce, skull-like mask over his head. My father and Gary would grow apoplectic over this nasty brawler and the obvious ways he cheated. One time, the man in the skull mask got thrown out of the ring and landed at our feet. My father and brothers proceeded to call him terrible names, and he looked up at them and shook his head. “Get back in there and fight like a man, you cowardly slob,” my father bellowed. The wrestler took a seat next to my father, leaned over to him and said: “Jesus, Mac, give me a fucking break. I’m just trying to make a living, like everybody else.”

  After that, my father and brothers liked the guy. Took him out one night for beers. Later, Gary started to run around with the wrestler and they would drink booze and cough syrup together. I later heard rumors that the two of them might have pulled a few jobs together. These days, the wrestler is a local conservative radio talk-show hero.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER 1960, we moved to a nice, fancy new home and started life over as a family. The same day we began the move, John F. Kennedy—the only man either of my parents ever voted for—was elected President of the United States. The world was changing. It felt different—more promising.