Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  Gaylen stayed at Brenda’s during his visit. She had recently been divorced, so she was grateful to have the companionship, plus, Gaylen was gracious about helping with house and yard work. He was captivating, cute, and bright, and she liked him as much as everybody liked him when Gaylen wanted to be likable. She could see, though, that he had a thing for women. She could hardly take him anywhere without Gaylen eyeing the good-looking locals or trying to sweet-talk somebody into a date. The Provo girls found him attractive—“He was just about the handsomest, most different kind of boy they had ever met,” said Brenda—but Mormon women weren’t too liberal about kissing or petting, and they were death on premarital sex, so Gaylen’s desires were repeatedly frustrated.

  Gaylen had a hard time going without a woman’s intimacy. One day, he went up to Salt Lake to pay his friend Kerry a visit. Kerry wasn’t there, but his wife was. Gaylen tried his moves on her, and she liked them. Gaylen and his friend’s wife started having an affair. They were fucking a couple of times a week and they were liking it—until Kerry came home from work early one afternoon and saw his good friend Gaylen going at his wife from behind. Kerry was a big man, and he decided his friendship with Gaylen was over. He picked Gaylen up and heaved him through the window, then went after him. He kicked Gaylen in the stomach and face for several minutes before his wife could pull him off.

  Gaylen spent several weeks in a Salt Lake hospital. His jaw had been broken in five places. He had to eat through a straw, and he couldn’t talk too well. Uncle Vern ended up paying all his medical expenses. He also visited Gaylen a couple of times. “You stupid son of a bitch,” said Vern. Gaylen couldn’t say much in return.

  Vern bought Gaylen a bus ticket back to Portland. He showed up at our door late one afternoon, his mouth still wired shut, trying to smile sheepishly. My mother just shook her head and asked him what kind of soup he felt like eating.

  GAYLEN’S TROUBLE IN SALT LAKE SLOWED HIM for a while. He started thinking about finding one woman and settling down. He also started attending the Mormon church with me and my mother, and to her great surprise and pleasure, he ended up joining the church within a few weeks.

  My mother was glad to have him back. She had recently regained some of her strength and had taken a job working as a bus-woman at a restaurant called Speed’s, on Milwaukie’s Main Street. Now, with Gaylen back, and apparently rehabilitated, she renewed her hope that our large house might be the thing that would hold us all together.

  This was the calmest I saw Gaylen, and it was also the closest the two of us ever became. Our new friendship had little to do with Gaylen now being a Mormon. Something about his conversion never seemed quite solid to me; it was more like a desperate longing for love and community than a declaration of belief. Also, Gaylen was hardly pious about sex. Every once in a while I’d come home from school to find him running around naked upstairs with one neighborhood girl or another. “Don’t you dare tell Mom about this,” he would say to me, and of course I never did tell her.

  In a way, our new closeness had something to do with our respective ages—the same thing that had once helped keep us apart. When Gaylen was twelve and I was six, we just didn’t have much to talk about. Now that I was sixteen and he was twenty-two, we had much more in common. By this time, we had read many of the same books, watched the same movies, heard the same music. We talked and argued constantly—he hated Bob Dylan and the Beatles; I loved both—but it was friendly arguing, even respectful. We became companions during this time-something I had never known before with one of my brothers. It helped, I’m sure, that we no longer had to fight over my father’s love. For a while, Gaylen was my best friend.

  But a peaceful life didn’t come easily to Gaylen. He had trouble fitting in with the other young people at the church. Most young men his age were on a mission or enrolled at Brigham Young University, and those were the men that the young Mormon women wanted. Also, Gaylen had seen too much of the world, knew too much about different ways of thinking and living, and the Mormons weren’t always comfortable with their knowledge of his history. They often would not invite him to social functions or young people’s parties.

  Soon, Gaylen was drinking again and seeing his old friends. Soon, he was writing bad checks again, and soon the police were coming to the door again. I was surprised at how quickly and deeply he got himself in trouble. Within a few months, there were warrants out for his arrest in Clackamas County, and there were friends who were angry about things they thought he may have stolen from them. Now when Gaylen got drunk, he was often mean-tempered, and he was almost always looking for new ways to fuck up his life even more.

  One night, when he was feeling the pressure of it all, Gaylen sat in the green leather armchair in our front room and drank a bottle of vodka. My mother sat there and watched him. I went upstairs and did my homework. I heard yelling and went back downstairs. Gaylen and my mother were arguing about money. He wanted her to give him two hundred dollars so that he could leave the state, but she told him she couldn’t— that was all the money she had, I told Gaylen: “Why don’t you lay off her? She can’t afford to give you that kind of money. Don’t you think she’s given you enough as it is?”

  “Keep the fuck out of this,” he told me. “You’re not the big man you think you are.” He turned to my mother and said: “I want the money. I’m not leaving here until I have it.” There was a palpable menace in the way he said it.

  My mother was trembling. She opened her purse and handed him one hundred dollars. “That’s all I can give you, and now I don’t even know how I’m going to feed us for the next month. You can never ask me for anything again,” she said, and then she started to cry.

  Gaylen stood up, took the money, put on his jacket.

  “If you leave here this way, with that money,” I said, “you aren’t my brother anymore.”

  He walked past me without a word and slammed the door on his way out. We learned later that he had gone straight to the restaurant where my mother worked and cashed another bad check. She had the employer take the money out of her wages, so he wouldn’t press charges against Gaylen.

  Gaylen ended up moving to Chicago and living under a different name. This time, we would not see him for five years.

  AT FORT LEVENWORTH, FRANK SAW MUCH OF THE SAME HORRIBLE STUFF that went on in all prisons: homosexual rapes and guard brutality. He knew he was in a dangerous place, and so he asked for—and received—a cell to himself.

  But staying to himself offended some of the other prisoners. They figured he was either independent or snobbish, and a few times, various prisoners tried to take him down a notch or two. There were some fights, plus an incident where an inmate tried to drop a heavy weight on his head. Frank knew that men got killed in these places. He saw one inmate attacked by others and slashed with a razor blade—so quickly, so many times, the guy was bloodied meat by the time he hit the ground.

  It was during this time that I convinced my mother we should start a letter-writing campaign to Oregon Senator Wayne Morse. The senator was known for being tempermental, but he was also a conscientious man—he was one of the U.S. Congress’s few early voices to speak out against the war in Vietnam. Eventually, that opposition cost him his Senate seat, during a bitter campaign in which Oregonians decided that Bob Packwood was a better representative of their concerns and beliefs.

  My mother and I wrote Morse letters and he wrote back, promising he would look into the matter. He contacted somebody who had influence in this area, and he asked: “Why is this man serving such a long sentence in a dangerous place for a nonviolent crime?”

  On March 1, 1967—nineteen months after my brother had been drafted—a Leavenworth official met with Frank and told him they were going to cut his sentence and the army was going to discharge him for “good cause”—which was the same as saying they recognized he had been fucked over. They gave him a little bit of money and a ride to the town of Leavenworth, Kansas. From there, Frank caught a bus back to Portl
and.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I WAS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN READING, when

  the front door opened and Frank walked in. Neither my mother nor I knew he had been released. It was a wonderful pleasure to see him, but I could tell that his time at Leavenworth had been hard on him. He seemed a much less happy person, and a more timid one.

  I was home alone at the time, and I wanted to call my mother and tell her that Frank was back. Frank said: “No. I’ll go down later and visit her where she works. I’ll surprise her.”

  Frank went upstairs to unpack. He came down a few minutes later and gently rested his hand on my shoulder. “Mikal, I have something I want to ask you.” There were tears in his eyes. “Have you or anybody else been in my bedroom or taken anything out of it?” I told him I’d gone in a few times to watch his TV or sleep in his bed, but that was about it. “Why?” I asked.

  “There’s something missing,” he said. “I had $219 hidden in my bedroom. It was all the money I have in the world. I was counting on having it when I got out. Do you know anything about it?”

  I shook my head. I had never known anything about Frank saving any money.

  Frank bit his lip and thought for a second, and then he said one word: “Gaylen.” It was all he had to say.

  He went back upstairs for a few minutes. When he came back down, he was wearing his coat and carrying his duffel bag. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want you to say a word about me being here to Mom, and don’t say anything about the missing money either. I think it’s best if I go away and never come back, and it’s also best if nobody knows where I am. That money was all I had in the world while I was in prison—it was all I could count on. To come home and find it gone … That means I don’t have a home here anymore. It means I don’t belong here.”

  I tried arguing with him, reasoning with him, telling him that running away would do no good. Finally, I tried begging him, and I said that if he left and Mother never knew what happened to him, it would be horrible for her—it could even kill her.

  Frank shook his head. “Nah. She doesn’t care about me. You’re the only one who’s cared about me. I want to thank you for writing those letters. I’m glad to see you’ve turned out to be okay. Take care of yourself.”

  And then he walked out.

  I was in a panic. I think it was one of the most painful moments I have ever known in my life. I felt terrible that Frank had gone through all that he had gone through with the army, just to come home to an even greater disappointment. And I felt horrible for my mother. I didn’t know how to face her without telling her. Soon, one way or another, she would know Frank had been released from prison, and she would wonder what had happened to him. I knew she would fear the worst.

  I sat in the dark on that winter night, crying for hours. I knew then what hell was: Hell was my family. It was having to live with people who did the worst things to people they should love the most.

  Later, shortly before the time my mother would arrive home from work, the door opened again, and it was Frank. He said he had gone for a long walk. He walked past the restaurant where our mother was working, and he saw her in there, busing dishes, looking half-crippled, and he knew he couldn’t leave her behind. He went in and said hello to her, told her he was back. She was happy and she cried, he said.

  Frank had a bag of groceries with him. He was going to fix us dinner.

  “Let me help you,” I said. “It’s good to have you home.”

  A WHILE BACK, FRANK AND I TALKED ABOUT THAT NIGHT. Frank, I could see, still hurt over what had happened. “It bothered me because a brother would do that,” he said. “Here I am, back after having that fucked-up two years of my life and I don’t even have any money to go out and get drunk.

  “I already felt like such a loser, coming home. And then, discovering that betrayal—I was pretty sour on life for a long time after that.”

  Did he ever ask Gaylen about it?

  “Oh yeah, a few years later. He admitted to doing it. Said he had no idea if I’d ever be coming back home. Couldn’t see letting the money sit there, going to waste.”

  I asked: Did Gaylen ever pay him back?

  Frank laughed a pleasureless laugh. “Are you kidding? We’re talking about Gaylen and Gary. They never paid anything back to anybody. Well, I guess Gary did, at the very end. I think then he was trying to pay everything back.”

  FRANK GOT A JOB DOING CUSTODIAL WORK AND BEGAN HELPING my mother pay the bills and keep the mortgage current. He also devoted himself to keeping the yard in shape. He still had dreams of getting his own apartment and having his own family, but he resigned himself to putting that off for a while, until my mother felt secure with her home.

  One day Frank met a young Chinese woman at his church. They started dating, and she invited him over to meet her parents. He went over a few times and had dinner. He liked the woman a lot, he realized. He was feeling serious about her.

  Frank thought he should return the young woman’s courtesy and bring her over to meet his family. I wasn’t there the day he brought his girlfriend to the house, but my mother was. Frank opened the front door and escorted the woman into our home. My mother was sitting in her customary spot in the kitchen.

  “Mom,” Frank said, “I have somebody here I’d like you to meet.”

  My mother turned around, saw the young Chinese woman standing in her kitchen, and her face turned red. “Get that whore out of my house!” my mother yelled at Frank.

  Frank stood there, staring at my mother. He was shocked beyond words. After an awkward, silent moment, he said: “But, Mom …”

  “You heard me. Get her out of here, and don’t ever bring her back.”

  By the time Frank and the woman got outside, the woman was crying. “I’m sorry,” Frank said. “I don’t know what to say. She can be a little crazy at times. She’s been worried about a lot of stuff recently.”

  The woman wiped her tears and said it was okay, she understood.

  That night, Frank went back home and said to my mother: “That’s it. I’ve tried to help you, but you can’t be helped. I can’t believe you would do something like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said. “She’s probably a very nice woman, but at the same time, I know the kind of woman you tend to like—you know, sluts. When I saw her standing there, I thought she was probably just somebody you’d found on the street.”

  Frank told my mother he was moving out. She begged him to stay. “I’ll be lost without you. I can’t run this place without you.”

  Frank said he would stay for a month or two and help her make the financial transition. As it worked out, he ended up staying forever.

  I knew nothing about this incident until a couple of years ago, when Frank told me. I asked him what had happened with him and the woman. “She was polite about it,” he said. “She was real nice. But what Mom did created an awful memory between us. In effect, it really killed the relationship.

  “I think Mom accomplished exactly what she wanted that day. I think she disabled my chance at love, my chance at family. I never came as close to any of it again after that.”

  AND WHAT ABOUT ME? Well, I was a kid in the 1960s.

  I was sixteen. I was a sophomore in high school. Though I liked books and was still moved by religion, I mainly had one thing on my mind—the same thing most kids I knew had on their mind, one way or another: sex.

  I didn’t really know all that sex was about. Nobody in my family had ever taken me aside and told me the first thing about it. I learned what I could by stealing a look at the occasional Playboy and by reading Henry Miller’s novels and John Cleland’s and Frank Harris’s pornographic classics. I hid these things in the closet of my bedroom and brought them out late at night, when I was done with Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse. The truth is, I read Miller and Harris more attentively than I ever read Hesse or even Melville. Sex seemed like it must be the most exciting and desirable thing in the world. I already looked forward to it more than anything else
.

  At the same time. I knew that it was not a good idea. My church absolutely forbade any form of premarital or nonmarital sex. Sex was a holy gift for procreation, we were told, and misusing that gift in any form was a sin so severe, it was second only to murder. At our Sunday priesthood meetings, our counselors were always warning us against this temptation. God found it an abhorrence for a man to spill his seed in any manner other than marital intercourse, and even then, seed should be spilled only for the purpose of procreation. An act like oral sex was an outrage. So was jacking off. Although these teachings weren’t exactly enough to stop you from having an erection, they could make you ponder what to do when you did have one. Somehow, praying for a hard-on to go away never worked.

  So, like most teenage males, and like probably every young Mormon man I knew, I masturbated—sometimes to my own passions or imagination, sometimes to the books and magazines I mentioned above, sometimes to the women’s underwear section of the Montgomery Ward catalog. And, like the other Mormon boys I knew, I was feeling guilty about what I did. Always resolving never to do it again. One time, I even made that resolution last for a while. Two weeks, I think.

  ON WEEKENDS, I WAS GOING TO THE TEEN DANCE CLUBS in downtown Portland. One of them, the Headless Horseman, was located in the space of an old gangster’s nightclub, where Gary used to hang out. Now, it was full of teenagers, all decked out in the semi-mod fashion that preceded the soon-to-come hippie era. We would go there in our wide-wale corduroys and polka-dot or flower-print shirts with white collars and cuffs, and our knee-high boots. My mother didn’t have much money, but she did her best to make sure I always had modern and fashionable clothes, bless her.

  Inside the clubs, we would ask teenage women in short skirts and hoop earrings to dance to the club’s regular bands—local groups like the Kingsmen (of “Louie, Louie” fame), the Wailers and, once in a blue moon, Paul Revere and the Raiders. Sometimes we would talk the girls into leaving the club and going to hang out in the stairwell of a large parking structure a few blocks away. We would kiss for hours—we called it making out, of course—and we would try to run our hands over the young women’s breasts or between their legs. I remember one girl telling me: “You sure have busy hands for a boy your age.” I guess she was right.