Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  The Beatles, of course, effectively changed all that. I didn’t know, of course, as I watched them on Sullivan that night, shaking their hair and singing “I Saw Her Standing There” and “She Loves You,” that what they were doing would open up for me a relation to the world and a doorway to the future that my family was helpless to match. All I knew right then was that I liked them, and like millions of other kids, I felt they belonged to me and my time. Later, I would like the Beatles even more because they seemed such a departure from the world of my brothers, and because my brothers could not abide them.

  Looking back, I realize now how incongruous these two associations were. Like many things teenage, and most things rock & roll, the Beatles were about sex and pushing or raising limits; you might even say they were about disruption and revolution. The Mormons were about freedom and salvation through order and authority; they did not abide non-marital sexuality, nor progressive culture or politics. In time, the contradictions between these two devotions would become apparent and I would have to make a choice. But in those days I was hungry for anything that resembled a direction, a way out of the curse that I already saw as my family’s lot. Rock & roll and the Mormons—each in important ways—helped give me that direction. In fact, I think the confluence of the two probably saved my life. In religion and rock & roll I would find a sense of community, where before I’d known none. I also found a sense of cause, of moral purpose. Interestingly, it was rock & roll that would end up serving me better over the years, and that would do a better job of illuminating the modern landscape of paradise lost and found. But it was still a few years before I would choose a life with the sinners over one with the saints. For the time being, I was happy to mingle with both.

  GAYLEN HAD BEEN IN AND OUT OF JAIL HIMSELF throughout this time. It was generally for rather petty stuff—usually public drunkenness or bad checks. Petty or not, the local cops were starting to take a special dislike to him. It didn’t help that he was Gary’s brother. He was one more item of bad news with the last name of Gilmore. There was also that nasty temper and pride of his. Whenever a policeman stopped him, Gaylen had some lip to give. If a cop insulted or hit him, Gaylen insulted and hit back. Usually, he got the worst end of the deal. I know, because I remember seeing the bruises from his police beatings.

  Soon, the police were coming over to our house at all hours. There would be a pounding at the door at three in the morning and I would look out and see a police car parked in front of the house. They were always looking for Gaylen for one thing or another. Often, he was there when they would come in and search the place. He had a special dark hole, behind a false wall in the basement, under the porch, where he liked to hide, and where they never found him. A few times, when the police would be walking up to the front, with their stiff boots clumping on the steps, Gaylen would take off out the back, slide into the front seat of his car, then wheel out onto Oatfield, honking and waving at the cops as he sped away. The police would take pursuit, but they rarely caught him. He was like the ill-fated hot-rod moonshiner in his favorite movie, Robert Mitchum’s Thunder Road.

  Sooner or later, of course, Gaylen would get arrested, and my mother would have to bail him out. This was a common ritual of our family life in these years. I got to know the face of every policeman and bail bondsman in the district, and I grew accustomed to accompanying my mother, in the post-midnight hours, during her numerous trips to the local police station, on Milwaukie’s Main Street, while she went about the business of bailing out her troubled, drunken son.

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that in time I would be seen as an extension of my brothers’ reputation. I can remember, while still in grammar school, being called into the principal’s office and receiving a warning that the school would never tolerate me acting as my brothers acted; I was told to watch myself, that my brothers had already used up years of that district’s good faith and leniency, and if I was going to be like them, there were other schools I could be sent to. At various times and in various forms, I received admonitions like this throughout the remaining years that I attended junior high and high school in Milwaukie. Once, I was waiting for a bus in the center of the small town when a town cop pulled over. “You’re one of the Gilmore boys, aren’t you? Goddamn, I hope you don’t end up like those two. I’ve seen enough shitheads from your family.” Another time, I was walking down the local main highway when a car of older teenage boys pulled over and piled out, surrounding me. “Are you Gaylen Gilmore’s brother?” one of them asked. They shoved me into the car, drove me a few blocks to a deserted lot, and took turns punching me in the face. I remembered Gary’s advice from that Christmas years before—“You can’t fight back; you shouldn’t fight back”—and so I let them beat me until they were tired, and then they spit on me and got back in their car and left.

  I cried every foot of the way back home, and I hated the world around me. I hated the small town I lived in, with its ugly, mean people, and for the first time, I hated my brothers. I felt as if I would never have a future because of them, that I would be destined to follow their lives whether I wanted to or not, that I would never know any relief from shame and pain and disappointment. I felt a deep rage of violence: I wanted to rip the faces off the boys who had beat me up. “I want to kill them,” I told myself, “I want to kill them”—and as soon as I realized what I was saying, and why I was feeling that way, I only hated my world and my brothers more.

  EVENTUALLY, THINGS STARTED TO CATCH UP WITH GAYLEN. The affair with Eve had not gone well. Or maybe it had gone too well. Eve was now pregnant. She loved Gaylen and wanted to marry him, and I think he felt the same, but neither her father nor my mother would tolerate the idea. One night, Gaylen got drunk and went over to visit Eve at the trailer court where she lived, down the road in Oak Grove. Gaylen got into a fight with her father, an unpleasant German named Adolf, and it ended with Gaylen on the floor under Adolf’s foot and a shotgun to his head. The police came and dragged my brother away.

  A day or two later, Gaylen and my mother had a horrible argument over the situation with Eve. They were both sitting in the kitchen, yelling at each other, and Frank was with them, trying to mediate. Things got out of hand. “I do not want you to see that girl again,” my mother shouted. Gaylen shouted back: “To hell with you. You can’t tell me what to do about this. Quit trying to fucking boss me.”

  My mother got up quickly, reached over to the kitchen counter and grabbed a long butcher’s knife, and before anybody could react, she had pushed Gaylen back against the wall in his chair, and was pressing the point of the knife up against his Adam’s apple. There was fire in her eyes, and her voice was slow and shaky. “You will not ever see that damn whore slut girl again. Do you understand me? If you do, I’ll kill you.”

  Everybody stayed still for a long moment, not talking or moving. My mother screamed at Gaylen a few more times, then backed away and went over and put down the knife. She sat down and started to cry. Gaylen got up, tears in his eyes, and walked out the back door. He kicked the screen so hard on his way out, it sailed into the backyard. He spent the rest of the day throwing his bowie knife at the cherry tree out back, until sap streamed like blood out of the knife wounds. The cherry tree never bloomed much after that.

  That was more or less the last that Gaylen got to see Eve. From what I hear, she went on to have a beautiful daughter, but Gaylen never got to see her or know her.

  GAYLEN’S LIFE OUTSIDE THE HOME GOT STRANGE and mysterious after that—much like the life Gary had been living a few years before.

  One night my mother and I were sitting in the kitchen, talking. A car pulled into our driveway with its lights off. It was an older sedan, and it was full of men. Something about the car’s approach triggered my mother’s fears. “Turn off the lights,” she commanded me. The men poured out of the car, rushed up on our front porch, and began pounding on the door. My mother took me upstairs and locked us into my father’s old office. From there, we could hear the men outsid
e. “Open the goddamn door, Gaylen,” they were shouting. “We know you’re in there. Don’t make us come in.” My mother called the police. Soon, the sound of sirens came climbing up the hill. The men rushed back to their car and took off.

  My mother and I went to some neighbors up the street and stayed until Frank came home from his job, at about one in the morning. When we reentered our house, we found that a back window had been broken. Gaylen’s bedroom had been ransacked.

  A night or two later, Gaylen showed up, looking bedraggled. My mother told him about what had happened. Gaylen took it all in and didn’t say a word. After a few moments of sitting there, he went out and got in his car and left. It was the last we would see of him for two years. The next we heard, he was in New York, reading his poems at a club somewhere in Greenwich Village, and drinking himself unconscious whenever possible.

  IN LATE AUGUST 1965, FRANK JR. WAS DRAFTED INTO THE ARMY. This was during the period when America’s involvement in Vietnam was heating up, and my mother and I worried about the prospect of my brother being sent off to fight, and perhaps die, for such a confusing and wasteful cause. Frank, though, had more metaphysical concerns. It was the belief of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that if a person served in the armed services and died on the battlefield, then it was the same as dying in a state of violence or sin. In such a case, one would forfeit his right to enter God’s kingdom. Frank had applied for the status of a conscientious objector, but his draft board had refused him. He had little choice but to face the army or a federal prison. For the present, he accepted his draft call, though he could not see himself as serving in an armed capacity.

  That was it. One night, Frank was there. The next morning he was gone. I felt worse about his leaving than anybody’s else’s. This was a kind and good man. I knew that the army would try to change him. They would try to make him as violent as his brothers.

  GARY WAS IN OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY, GAYLEN WAS IN NEW YORK, Frank was stationed at California’s Fort Ord. That left just me and my mother in that big house that we could no longer afford or fill.

  This was a lonely and destitute time. We had run out of money, and we were now subsisting on what came in monthly from my father’s Social Security payments.

  This was also the period when I began to grow closer to my mother. There was little choice—it was just her and me now—but also I suppose I was ready to learn to see the world through her eyes, to hear it described in her voice. What a painful, persecuting world it was. It was in this time that I came to understand just how much my mother, like my father or Gary or Gaylen, identified with the life and causes of an outsider. She had, in effect, been one all her life—first, as a young girl who wanted to break rules, then, as a young woman who did break them, and finally, as a woman who had to pay and pay for having broken those rules. I learned that the world would not forgive those who flaunted its rules—that it would destroy you for doing so. My mother was an outcast. My brothers were outcasts. My mother promised that I would be one too. I would have to be strong, she told me; I would have to learn to live with the world’s condemnation, and with its punishments. I thought she was probably right, but what I didn’t tell her was I thought that the fearful world she talked about included my family. I dreamed of keeping not only the world on the outside, but also of keeping my family on the outside.

  One day, I suddenly found myself living that way. In the early winter of 1965, my mother fell gravely sick and had to enter the hospital to have her gall bladder removed, or something similar. I would go visit her every day, then I would go home to the big house. I was just starting high school, and I was living by myself—at least for a few weeks. It was the first time in my life, since the years alone with my father, that I felt happy and safe.

  OF COURSE, IT COULDN’T LAST. A FEW WEEKS LATER my mother came home from the hospital. But things were never quite the same. The surgery had taken something out of her. After this, she would start to live a more limited life. The first sign of this came within moments of her arriving back home. She refused to venture to her bedroom upstairs. She said she no longer had the strength to climb those steps. Instead, she moved her sleeping quarters downstairs, to the same sofa and living room that my father had made his own, during his last few weeks in our big lost house. My mother never again went upstairs. Also, after that, my mother rarely let strangers, or even friends, come into our house.

  In the months that followed, the house and yard began to fall into disrepair. My mother could no longer take care of her gardens, and I found the place too big to handle. In time, the grass out front grew knee-high. The property looked awful, and forbidding. Eventually, some folks at the Mormon church started coming over regularly to help keep the yard in shape. By now, they more or less thought of us as a welfare family.

  WITH MY MOTHER NOW LIVING DOWNSTAIRS, I had the entire run of the upstairs. Some weeks, I would sleep in a different room every night. Then I started hearing the voices.

  I would awaken about three in the morning, and I would hear voices outside my bedroom door, maybe five or six feet away, at about the place where the mysterious gap space existed in our hallway. I’d lie there and hear those voices for an hour or two—sometimes until the sky started to lighten outside. They were audible but not distinct, like a mumbling from behind closed doors.

  One day, after losing a night’s sleep to these sounds, I asked my mother: “Do you ever hear anything odd during the night?”

  “Almost every night,” she replied, “I hear voices. Sometimes, they sound like they are upstairs, in one of our bedrooms. Sometimes, they’re in other rooms, or just somewhere in the air. They speak low, but I think I know what they are saying. They are talking about our future and how they plan on taking the life out of each of us.”

  I thought to myself: Great—I’m becoming as crazy as everybody else in this damn family. After that, I started sleeping with a pillow over my head. It kept out the voices of the ghosts.

  FRANK’S TERM IN THE ARMY PROVED ROUGH FROM THE START. His commanders knew he was a Jehovah’s Witness and opposed to armed service. They didn’t have much sympathy for such a stance. They would dress him down in front of the other men, calling him names, telling him they were going to break him.

  For a while, Frank tried to become a medic. But that wasn’t good enough for his superiors. They wanted Frank to learn to load, carry, and fire a rifle, and to learn how to wield a bayonet. His commander told him: “You will have to do things according to the military, or you will be subject to court-martial.”

  Frank replied: “I can’t do things according to the military. It goes against my religious beliefs.”

  The officer ordered Frank to pack his duffel bag and march over to the Fort Ord stockade, two miles away. He would have to stay there until he could be court-martialed. “They had no guard on me during my march over there,” Frank said. “I mean, I could have easily taken off. The bus station was over there. I could have gone there, bought a ticket, and been gone. I could have been in Canada in two days. But I knew if I did that, this thing would have been dragging on for the rest of my life. I thought I may as well get it over with. Still, all the way over there, I kept thinking: ‘I wish they would accept me as a medic.’ I wanted to go in and do my duty and come out with a good name. But I didn’t want to violate my beliefs, and I didn’t want to take off running and be AWOL.”

  While the enlisted men and draftees were in the stockade, awaiting courts-martial, the military guards put them on endless work details. “It would be pointless stuff,” said Frank, “like picking crabgrass out of the sand. It was just a nonsense thing, to make you sore and tired—a form of harassment. You would do it for hours and hours.

  “We were out on detail one time, and this young kid standing by me just kind of snapped. He turned to me and said: ‘I’m going to try to escape. You better hit the ground.’ He started running and the guard fired and hit the kid. Later, I heard the guard got another stripe on his shoulder for shooting the gu
y. That bothered me, to shoot a kid and cripple him. He wasn’t a bad kid at all. Why couldn’t the guard have shot in the air and warned him? But they had this strict thing: Don’t let anybody escape. And while I was there, nobody did escape. After I saw that, I got badly depressed. That’s when I knew I was in for hell.”

  FRANK WAS IN THE STOCKADE FOR THREE MONTHS before his court-martial. The charge was: disobeying a direct order from a commanding officer. It was a one-day trial—another open-and-shut affair. The military prosecutor charged that my brother was as bad as the enemy. In fact, he claimed, Frank was worse than a communist: He was a coward. “I knew better,” Frank said: “I was no more of a coward than any of them.

  “I told them that. I told them I was happy to work as a medic. But I wasn’t going to line up and go out and kill somebody or be killed on the front. I was afraid that if I killed somebody, I would probably have become ruthless. I probably would have become a maniac on the battlefield, to be honest. I thought about that many times. And I knew if that happened, in my mind and heart, I would have been lost. I would have been one of the worst. And then I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I would have gone out and got myself killed. I decided that a federal prison was better than that.”

  The military court sentenced Frank to three years of hard time at Fort Leavenworth. “If I’d had a civilian lawyer,” he told me years later, “I could have gotten thirty days and a dishonorable discharge. I saw it happen to a lot of the white guys who had fancy lawyers. But Mom had no money left for me. By then, she had spent it all on Gary and Gaylen.

  “In those days, I was into praying a lot. I thought, ‘I’m just going to hang by God and see what happens.’”

  GAYLEN GREW TIRED OF NEW YORK. It was a long way from home.

  During the time Frank was in Fort Leavenworth, Gaylen turned up in Provo, Utah. Like Frank and Gary, he had fond memories of my grandparents’ farm, and he wanted to see his cousins and aunts and uncles. He also had an old friend, named Kerry, who now lived in Salt Lake with his new wife.