But this darker side of Gaylen hadn’t fully emerged yet. For now he was simply drinking much more than a seventeen-year-old boy should ever drink, and he had taken to hanging out with a tougher group of friends, from Milwaukie’s poor part of town. He was smarter than these kids, but that didn’t seem to bother him. They were willing to do things that the better-heeled kids weren’t willing to do.
Gaylen was also starting to hit his stride with the local women. He drove a beautiful, blue Jeepster convertible and he wore fine silk shirts and, for a time, he sported a sharp, hip goatee. He looked like a young Robert Mitchum—dangerous and vulnerable at the same time.
The stance worked like magic. He was always pulling into the driveway with one alluring young woman or another. The one I remember best was Eve. She had curly black, shoulder-length hair, and she would wear her blouse open down the middle and knotted around her waist. She was sweet and she was lovely, and best of all, she was nice to me. She would give me kisses on the cheek that awoke something in me that had not stirred before.
Gaylen and Eve would pull up into the driveway and Eve would wave at me. Gaylen would take the car into the open-sided carport, and the two of them would sit and kiss and pet for hours. From the viewpoint of the kitchen—my mother’s constant perch—you couldn’t see much more than the rear end of the Jeepster. From my viewpoint upstairs, though, you could see a lot more. Gaylen would open Eve’s blouse and pull on her nipples, and he would run his fingers down into her tight cutoffs. That always made her squirm memorably. Except for my brief encounter with Gary’s adolescent threesome a few years before, this was the first time I’d known the presence of sex around our home. Through all this, my mother was keeping her eye on the car in the carport, and she was quietly fuming.
SIX MONTHS AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, GARY FINISHED serving his sentence for driving without a license and was released from Rocky Butte Jail. He came back to live with us, and for a while he and Gaylen began running around together. It would seem like a natural enough pairing—two look-alike brothers, partners in crime—but there were ways in which the two of them were fundamentally different. Gary was dealing in a lot of extremes by this point, and he always had a test or code or some damn thing you had to pass to meet his standards. Gaylen, meantime, simply wanted the adventure and experience. He liked dangerous ideas much more than he liked dangerous acts. With Gary, he got a bit of both. Gary got him into drinking cough syrup and running around with some truly mean-spirited thugs, pulling bullshit robberies and attending all-night sex parties.
One night Gary and Gaylen got into a fight. It had to do with a woman. No doubt Gaylen had made a move on somebody that Gary considered off limits. Gary attacked Gaylen and Gaylen ended up decking him, then taking off. Gary sat and nursed his jaw between shots of whiskey and cough syrup. Then he opened his car trunk, pulled out a tire iron, and told a friend he was going to go find Gaylen. He was going to kill him. The way he said it, the friend could tell he wasn’t kidding. Somehow, word got back to Frank and Frank got word to Gary. “If you kill our brother,” Frank said, “then it’s between you and me.” Gary got the message. He put the tire iron away and sent back his own message: “Tell Gaylen to stay away from me.”
Gaylen and Gary kept a distance from each other for years after that.
THESE WERE AMONG GARY’S DARKER DAYS. He had made friends with people who were running prostitution and dealing drugs. Some of these people did hard things in hard ways, and Gary helped out when he could. I had lunch one day with a man who had known Gary a bit during this period and had also known Gary’s friends. “Portland’s heavy criminals,” he said, “may seem banal compared to the more sophisticated criminal syndicates you find in other places—they might even seem like a bunch of bush-league hicks—but that doesn’t make them any less deadly. It might even make them deadlier, since they feel they have to prove their toughness a little more.
“Your brother,” he went on, “was somebody who was known as a good, steady backup guy. He was somebody you might take along for a second hand when you had to do a certain bad job, and you wanted somebody who could back your action plus keep their mouth shut afterward. Gary worked that way for some of these folks. He was the guy you might have on the lookout when you went inside a place to do something, or the guy you would have waiting with the getaway car. He was somebody you would use, but only so much. You included him because you were afraid of how he might take it if you left him out. There were harder guys in Gary’s circle than Gary, but I don’t think there was anybody who wasn’t a little afraid of him. They knew he would do anything to make his point, and that he would never be intimidated by a threat or challenge.”
Every now and then, one of Gary’s crimes would land him in jail, though never for more than a couple of weeks during this particular period. The jailers found Gary’s behavior becoming more and more peculiar and disturbing. One time, when he was at Rocky Butte on a hit-and-run charge, the jail had him committed to Dammasch Hospital, which was the state mental facility. Gary had been insisting to the jailers that he knew there was some sort of conspiracy at work against him, and the jail’s officers were a part of it. He threw a bowl of hot soup into the face of another inmate, who was working in the kitchen. Gary swore there was poison in the soup. Then he set fire to the mattress in his cell. At the hospital, he told the attending doctor that a radar set had been installed on the roof of the jail and set to his frequency. He also said that he heard voices coming through the jail vents, talking about him late at night. Plus, he was having more savage headaches. One of the hospital’s psychiatrists decided this was all a ruse: Gary probably figured jail time was easier to serve in a hospital than in a cell, or maybe he thought the hospital would offer easier escape opportunities. Gary was returned to the jail. That’s when he started slitting his wrists. He went back to the hospital and finished out most of his sentence there.
THIS IS ONE OF THOSE STORIES THAT NORMAN MAILER originally related in The Executioner’s Song, and that I somehow managed to shut out of my memory, even after reading the book two or three times:
My mother came home one afternoon to find Gary sitting in her green leather armchair, holding a document in his hand. He was glaring angrily at my mother, something she had never seen him do before. “I want to show you something,” he said, and handed her the piece of paper. It was his original birth certificate—the one from McCamey, Texas—with the name Faye Robert Coffman. “Maybe you would like to tell me about this.”
My mother had kept the certificate in her desk all these years. Apparently. Gary had picked the lock and found it. She was taken aback, and she was livid. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said.
Gary shook his head. “Hell, Mom, no wonder the old man never liked me. I was never really his son, was I?”
“How dare you make such an accusation. Of course you were his son. That was just a name we were using when we were traveling through Texas.”
“Don’t give me that fucking bullshit.”
“And don’t you dare talk to me like that. You’re the one who should apologize. You could have asked me about this. Instead, you were in my desk without permission.”
“I never would have gotten this news with permission, would I?” said Gary. He got up out of the chair, grabbed his jacket, and handed the certificate to my mother.
“You can keep it,” she said to him, trying to force a smile.
“No-thank-you,” he said, biting off each word. It was the iciest way he had ever spoken to her.
“Gary, there are some things you don’t know, but this isn’t what you think it is.”
He said nothing. He walked out of the house, slamming the front door behind him. It was the last time my mother ever saw Gary as a free man.
ONE OF GARY’S FRIENDS DURING THIS TIME was a young black man named Cleophis. Once in a while Gary would bring Cleophis around the house. Mostly, they would sit in a car out in the driveway, drinking beer, talking, laughing. Cleophis
was a friendly guy—he seemed nicer than most of Gary’s friends—but, like Gary, he had a taste for intoxicating narcotics.
A day or two after his confrontation with my mother, Gary was hanging out at Fred Meyer, a local variety store, with Cleophis. They went into the drug department, where Gary had the pharmacist fill a prescription for a narcotic-based cough syrup. As the clerk was checking the known-addicts list, Gary spotted a man at a nearby register cashing a check. Gary couldn’t tell how much money the man had, but he saw him put a wad of green bills in his pocket. “We’ll be back for that prescription in a little bit,” Gary told the clerk, and then signaled Cleophis to accompany him. They followed the man out to the parking lot, and then got in their car and followed him as he drove along. “What are we doing, Gary?” Cleophis asked.
“We’re going to rob this fucker,” Gary said. “I’ve got a lead pipe in the back seat we can use on him.”
“Oh, man,” said Cleophis, “I don’t want to do that kind of shit.”
Gary gave Cleophis a hard look—a warning look. “Don’t chicken out on me,” he said. “Back my play.”
The man pulled into his driveway and Gary pulled in after him. He and Cleophis got out of the car and somebody—it isn’t clear to me which of the two—brandished the lead pipe. Gary grabbed the man, took his money, threw him to the ground, then he and Cleophis took off. They had come away with eleven dollars for their trouble.
As they pulled away, somebody took note of their license plate, the model of the car, and the direction they were headed.
BACK AT THE HOUSE ON OATFIELD, Frank was sitting in the living room watching TV. He was the only one home. He heard a car pull in and he got up and looked out. It was Gary and Cleophis. He didn’t think much about it. They were always coming and going.
A few minutes later, he heard a good deal more noise—like a legion of movement in the driveway. Frank looked out again and this time he saw the yard was full of city and county police cars, their red lights spinning and blazing. There were maybe twenty or more cops standing alongside their cars, all with their rifles and pistols aimed at Gary and Cleophis, who were standing in the side yard. Cleophis had his hands up and was standing still, but Gary was weaving around, like he didn’t know what was happening.
Frank went tearing out the back door and put himself between the cops and Gary. “Please don’t shoot my brother,” he said.
“If you don’t want to get shot yourself,” one policeman said, “get out of here.”
Then, all the cops were yelling at Frank: “Get the hell out of the way!” As they said it, other police cars were flooding up the hill and closing off the street.
Something about the exchange between Frank and the cops pulled Gary back to earth, out of his narcotic haze. He raised his hands, looked at the policemen, and said: “Don’t shoot him. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.” To Frank he said: “Frank, get out of the way. I know what all this is about.”
The police closed in, handcuffed Gary and Cleophis, and took them to the Clackamas County Jail, in Oregon City.
GARY WAS IN SERIOUS TROUBLE THIS TIME, AND WE ALL KNEW IT. He was facing assault and robbery charges, plus he already had a long record of offenses behind him. Though none of his previous crimes had been too serious—and none had involved violence—the accumulation was enough to convince the prosecutor that Gary was already a habitual criminal and a danger to society. The D.A. elected to take the case to trial and seek a long sentence.
In the months following the arrest, while preparations were being made for the trial, Gary had started assaulting other inmates in jail-particularly older men—so the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation. At the hospital, Gary continued to threaten everybody around him and kept cutting himself up. He insisted to one psychiatrist that the suicide attempts were genuine. In his notes for the judge, the doctor wrote that Gary stated “he wanted to bleed to death, wanted to die, but more than that he wants to bleed to death.” Looking at those words now, it all seems so apparent: This was Gary’s first stab at Blood Atonement.
It is possible, as his jailers and one or two doctors assumed, that Gary was faking his mental episodes. Of course, just because somebody is faking craziness doesn’t mean they aren’t crazy. In any event, Gary was judged competent and able to stand trial. The state doctor’s final diagnosis was: “Sociopathic personality, antisocial type with intermittent psychotic decompensation.”
Gary’s trial took place at the Oregon City Court House, in the middle of March 1964, and lasted for three days. Cleophis, Gary’s partner, had turned witness against him, though it would have been an open-and-shut case even without that testimony.
On the last day of the trial, I was at home when the phone rang. My mother was keeping a doctor’s appointment but had left a number for me to call in case I learned that a verdict was going to be announced. I answered the phone. It was Gary. At first I thought he must have been found not guilty. How else could he be calling me?
“How you doing, partner?” he asked. “Look,” he said after a moment, “I just wanted to let you and Mom know: I got sentenced to fifteen years.”
I was stunned. I didn’t really know what to say. “Gary, what can I do for you?” I asked. I think it came out wrong, like I was saying: I’m busy; what do you want?
“I … I didn’t really want anything,” Gary said, his voice sounding broken. “I just wanted to hear your voice. I just wanted to say good-bye. You know, I won’t be seeing you for a few years. Take care of yourself.”
It was a wrenching moment. Gary and I hadn’t shared anything so intimate since that Christmas night, many years before, when he told me about his life in reform school. I felt I had somehow messed up something important—that I had failed him at a crucial moment. That feeling stayed with me for years. In fact, it’s still with me.
When my mother got home, I gave her the news. She sat down in her kitchen chair and cried long and hard—even harder than she cried at the time of my father’s death. I had never witnessed that much grief in a person.
IN NOVEMBER 1963. WHILE GARY WAS AWAITING TRIAL, President John F. Kennedy was shot in the head, during a visit to Dallas, Texas. Like any other American family, we were stunned by this event. The violence that happened that day seemed much bigger than anything we had ever known before: It was violence that changed the possibilities of the nation and its future and also spoiled a good part of its past, and I think we all understood that, even then. We talked and cried and grieved over that killing for days, but none of us ever said anything about the violence in our own lives. I don’t think I even understood there was violence in our hearts. The funny thing is, when that darkness later erupted in its ugliest form, it too would become a historical episode of American bloodshed.
In any event, Christmas that year was dismal. Both Gary and Gaylen were in jail. The family was running out of money. The nation was still in mourning. All the winter nights felt black. It was the first time my mother had not put up a Christmas tree, or even a wreath.
SOMEWHERE AROUND THIS PERIOD, MY MOTHER DECIDED it was finally time for me to become a Mormon. She invited some of the church’s young adult missionaries to pay us regular visits and to explain the fundamentals of the Latter-Day Saints religion to me. Every few days I would sit in the living room with these young men, and they would tell me the story of Joseph Smith’s ordeal—the agony he had known as a young man, trying to find the true church, and the wonder of God revealing himself and the secrets of heaven to this young son of a farmer. I was captivated by this tale—especially by the part about the finding of the golden plates and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, and the uplifting of the Smith family itself from poverty to fame to tragedy. Something in this story felt familiar—my mother had spoken mysteriously many times about a treasure my father had once had and lost and that might still be uncovered. As a result, I felt that by accepting the Mormons I was, somehow, regaining my father, even though I knew he had hated these people. Als
o, I could tell that my joining the Mormon church would mean a great deal to my mother. It would be a kind of vindication of her past, maybe even a way of making up for her own apostasy. And so I was baptized a Mormon and began attending various church services several times a week. I would remain active and committed to the church and its beliefs until the middle of my adolescence.
Then, a short time later—during the time that Gary was awaiting trial—something else happened that would end up making a difference in my life. On February 9, 1964 (which was also my thirteenth birthday, and the day I joined the Mormon priesthood), the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was no stranger to rock & roll. My brothers had loved the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, and they played that music around our home constantly. Interestingly, my father—who, obviously, was no fan of youthful rebellion—also liked rhythm & blues and early rock & roll. It was one of the few pleasures he had never forbidden his sons. Looking back, I now see how the music of Presley and the others had helped represent and speak for my brothers’ insurgence: It was a hard-tempered rebellion, without an immediately apparent ideology. It was wonderful stuff, but by the time I was an adolescent, the spirit of that music had largely been spent, and rock & roll had lost much of its gift for galvanizing or symbolizing youthful upheaval.
Shot in the Heart Page 31
