Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  The bishop was right: It was an emotional thing. I sat in on a couple of the meetings that he had with her and Grace. My mother got so livid in the discussions that she got up and walked out. She later said: “Who were they to think I didn’t need that house?”

  Grace went with my mother when she visited Gary and told him that the church had refused her plea and that she would now almost definitely lose the house. Grace later said that visit was the only time she ever saw Gary get angry. He couldn’t stand the thought that my mother’s church had turned her down, and now she would forfeit her beautiful home. Grace said that was the day she first saw a look of murder cross Gary’s face.

  IN MY LAST FEW WEEKS OF HIGH SHOOL, I WON A TUITION scholarship to Portland State University. Within a week or two of my graduation—in the late spring of 1969—I was looking for my own apartment in downtown Portland. It seemed a reasonable thing to do: I would be attending school in downtown Portland, and I should live close to the campus. But there was another, truer reason for why I was leaving home: I wanted to. I had always wanted to.

  I could tell as I moved my last belongings out of the house on Oatfield that my mother was hurting deeply someplace inside, but she was smiling bravely, and she was saying encouraging things. Looking back now, it tears my heart to think about that parting. But at the time, my heart did not feel such pain.

  A week later, I went back to the house to visit my mother. I walked up on the front porch, opened the door, and stepped into an empty front room. Where before there had been furniture and a television and people, there was now only vacancy. I walked through the entire place. My mother and brother were gone. There wasn’t a trace of them or anything they owned. Being in that empty old house scared the hell out of me. I felt a chill spot as I walked through the upstairs hallway. I feared that at any moment a set of black claws might appear out of nowhere and swipe me into the darkness. I got out as quickly as I could.

  I called Grace. She explained to me that my mother had lost the house a few days after I left and was forced to give it back to the mortgage holders. She had been fighting to hold on as long as possible, so that I could finish high school without the disruption or shame of losing my home.

  “I didn’t know that things were this imminent,” I told Grace.

  She said: “Your mother didn’t want you to know. She wanted to protect you.”

  My mother and brother had made the down payment on a small trailer and were now living in a courtyard park, down the main highway, in the semi-rural outpost of Oak Grove. They did not yet have a phone.

  I went to see them. The trailer was aqua green and white, and had two small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a living room-kitchen area. There was no air-conditioning, and it was hot and sticky in there. I could tell that my mother felt crushed. As she later told me and many other people: “I died the day I moved into this place.”

  I was officially parted from my family. My brother Frank would stay with my mother until the day she died, but I would never go back home, and the three of us would never sleep under the same roof again.

  FOR A LONG TIME, I DID NOT LOOK BACK. I tried college for a while, but after a bad love affair, I lost the footing of my educational career and never regained it. I went on to have many other girlfriends; I went on to participate in radical politics; I went on to use numerous drugs, without ever developing any drug problems—at least not for a time. And when I tired of what I saw drugs doing to my generation, I went on to become a drug counselor—a vocation I worked at for several years.

  Only one time during this period did I visit my brother Gary. It was in the aftermath of the love affair I just mentioned. The woman and I had been boyfriend and girlfriend for our last year or two of high school, and we were talking about getting married. Then one day she met a man she really liked—a born-again Christian—and within a few weeks, they were married and she was pregnant. I felt shattered. I felt that a dream— the possibility for a family of my own—had been taken away from me. I started staying up all night drinking, sleeping all day. I quit college, lost my tuition, and ran out of money. I was a mess. It was a classic case of romantic depression, and I was milking it for everything I could.

  Then one Sunday, my mother and Grace talked me into accompanying them to Salem to visit Gary. I guess they thought it would do me some good. Gary and I were nervous and tentative with each other at first—we had not seen each other for years, and I was now a young longhaired man, sitting in a room with a lot of shorthaired men, some of whom weren’t looking too kindly at me. But after a few minutes of talking with my brother, I realized how much I still loved him, and how much I had missed having him around. When he asked me how I had been, I told him. I told him everything—the whole story about the bad romance and the ensuing despair. I thought he would understand. I thought, if anybody would give me sympathy, it would be him.

  Instead, he sat silently for several long moments, regarding me. Finally, he smiled his crooked smile, and said: “Well, partner, that sounds rough. But anytime you want to trade your troubles for mine, let me know. I mean, hell, at least nobody has taken your youth from you. You’re still free.”

  At the time, I thought: He doesn’t understand. I realize now he understood far more than I ever could. Once again, Gary was telling me the truth about our lives. Maybe if I’d understood that, things might have ended up different.

  ONE DAY IN EARLY 1971, MY MOTHER CALLED ME IN A PANIC. She had a horror story to tell.

  She and Grace had gone to see Gary at Oregon State Penitentiary the day before. When Gary entered the visiting room, my mother said, he was a different man than she had ever seen before. His face and hands were bloated—like the flesh of a drowning victim—and he was taking heavy steps, like a stuporous Frankenstein monster. He could barely talk; he slurred his sentences, and a stream of drool ran out of his mouth, between the words. When he tried taking sips from a cup of coffee, he couldn’t hold his hands steady, and the drink kept sloshing over the cup’s rim. He couldn’t even feel the burn of the hot liquid as it poured onto his lap.

  My mother put her arms around him. “What is wrong with you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been Prolixed,” Gary said thick-tongued. “The psychiatrist and warden here have put me on a heavy medicine, Prolixin. They use it to control the prisoners they don’t like. They’re punishing me because I’ve been angry with them about my teeth.”

  Gary tried to explain more, but putting the words together was a terrible effort. He ended up just sitting there, his mouth hanging open. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he finally said. “I can’t stay any longer. I’ve got to go back to my cell and lie down.”

  As he stumbled from the visiting room, all eyes were on him. A few of the other inmates offered words of encouragement as he walked by: “Steady as you go. Hang in there.”

  When Gary had left, my mother stayed in her chair, sobbing uncontrollably, as Grace tried to comfort her.

  My mother and Grace went to find the warden. They ended up talking with the assistant warden. My mother demanded to know why Gary was being given this medicine. She was livid. The assistant warden was unmoved. He told her that Prolixin was the best drug they had available to help them deal with violent prisoners. Gary’s behavior, he indicated, warranted the drug.

  My mother walked out of the prison, full of fury and hatred, and feeling helpless.

  “They’ve turned your brother into a zombie,” she told me that day on the phone, crying. “He was like a walking dead man. We have to do something about this.”

  THE CIRCUMSTANCES LEADING UP TO GARY’S PROLIXIN EPISODE had been building for years. It all stemmed from two problems: Gary could be a difficult man to handle in incarceration, plus, he was a man badly in need of a set of functional false teeth. The combination of these two conditions created the setting for a terrible conflict that would know few bounds.

  Shortly after his arrival at OSP in the spring of 1964, the prison dentist examined Gary’s teeth and decided they sh
ould all be extracted and replaced with upper and lower dentures. The dentist made Gary the dentures, but they did not fit well. They rubbed against his gums and scraped them raw. Talking or eating had become a painful ordeal. Gary requested new dentures, but when he received them, he had the same problem, so he destroyed them. The prison decided he was being difficult and they weren’t going to jump to meet his demands. Gary decided that the officials were refusing to issue him workable dentures as a way of punishing him further.

  This battle went on for years. In fact, it would not be until 1975, following Gary’s transfer to a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, that he would finally receive a set of comfortable false teeth that he could live with. In the meantime, he raised constant and momentous hell, and the dentures issue became a contest of wills between him and the Oregon prison authorities. He wrote numerous letters to the Oregon State Corrections Board and to two consecutive state governors, complaining about the situation. All these officials wrote the prison, seeking explanations and solutions. Gary got in frequent fights and arguments with the guards and other prisoners, which resulted in his being beaten and then isolated in a bare-bones segregation cell, sometimes for several months at a time. He set fire to his mattress, flooded his cell, and got sent to the psychiatric security unit. He attacked one dentist and threatened to kill another. He had my mother place an ad in Oregon’s largest newspaper, urging the public to take up his cause with a letter-writing campaign. For a while, the warden received a steady flow of letters from around the state, all demanding “equal justice for Gary Gilmore.”

  I have a large file box, full of hundreds of documents related to this affair. You could write a book alone based on the drama of those correspondences and prison reports, and it would be a remarkable tale of outrage and devastation.

  In 1970 and ’71, the trouble came to full boil. A couple of days after Christmas in 1970, Gary was admitted to the prison’s psychiatric unit. The resident psychiatrist, Dr. Wesley Weissert, noted: “Gilmore was, in general, very antagonistic, belligerent, uncooperative, with specific incidents being urinating on the floor, throwing his food against rail, spitting at various aides (including the undersigned), and in general being ‘obnoxious.’ “ Gary told the doctor that his anger stemmed from his problems with the dental department. The doctor thought that perhaps Gary was being manipulative about the whole matter. Gary became angry and spit in Weissert’s face several times. Weissert noted: “[An] attempt was made to try and convince him that we cannot fortify bad behavior such as he has been exhibiting. If the acting out continues for the next 24 to 48 hours, he will be given an intramuscular Prolixin to help control his verbal and physical aggressive assaults.”

  Gary calmed down for a few weeks, but soon his rages resumed. He was threatening suicide, but Weissert thought that Gary wasn’t genuinely depressed enough to kill himself. In the first week of February, Gary talked several other inmates in the segregation unit into joining his protest. All of them—Gary included—slashed their wrists. Two of them almost died.

  About a month later, Dr. Weissert prescribed Prolixin for Gary. Prolixin is a medication that can provide some true psychotics relief from the nightmares of imagined voices and other delusions. It has also occasionally been used in prisons and jails to calm down troubled or hostile men. Many doctors, though, believe that this is not an advisable use, since the drug can also make some people intensely restless or nervous. An average recommended dose of Prolixin might be in the range of 2 cc. to 4 cc. a month. Gary claimed that he was given 16 cc. a month for three months, which, if true, could be considered a large dose; however, I have not been able to obtain any records that may confirm or refute this claim.

  According to some men I’ve talked with who also experienced the drug, it can sometimes make your body so anxious that you feel a need to stretch or bend as much as possible—a side effect basically known as akathesia. One man told me he had even seen other men try to bend over backward and snap their spines, so that they could end the miserable irritation. In Gary’s case—at least according to Gary, though other prisoners from the period corroborated his account—the guards would keep him tied to his cot for hours on end, just to watch him writhe in misery. Gary, however, stayed defiant. One time, when a guard got close enough to him, Gary covered him in spit. The guard, Gary later said, began choking him and then put a pillow over his head. “I was about to go out,” Gary said, when another guard thought it had gone far enough. The guards punched my brother in the face a few times while he was strapped down, then wheeled him under a bright overhead light and left him there all night. On Prolixin, my brother said, the brightness of the light was unbearable, and sleep was impossible.

  One of Gary’s friends from the prison during these days, a man named Steve Bekins, told me: “Gary was never the same man after Prolixin. He was full of hatred, and he simply knew no boundaries. He would go as far as he could to make the prison authorities angry, even if it meant hurting himself. Some guys became more distant from Gary after all that. You could tell he was now a man full of murder.”

  DURING THE TIME ALL THIS WAS HAPPENING, I got another call from my mother. “Your brother Gaylen has come home,” she told me. “He got tired of life in Chicago, and he decided he missed us. He’s come back to face his bad check charges, and he wants to make a new life.”

  I was glad to hear the news. Whatever bad feelings I had once had about my last encounter with Gaylen had long been forgotten. If my mother could forgive him, then I should too. Besides, I missed his wit and his smarts.

  “I have to warn you about something,” my mother continued. “Gaylen is not the same as the last time you saw him.” “What do you mean?”

  “Well… for one thing, he’s much thinner now. Something happened to him in Chicago. He got sick—something to do with his stomach. I know he had to have surgery, and it’s left him a little frail. Also, there was a bad romance. He had to leave behind the girl he loved. He’s pretty brokenhearted. I think he needs some friends. I think he needs his family.”

  Indeed, something had happened to Gaylen in Chicago, and indeed, he was no longer the same man. When he showed up at my door later that night, I did not recognize him. He was so skeletal, so dark-eyed, he looked like a walking cadaver. Just as troubling, much of his sharpness was gone. His speech was slurred, and his mind seemed slower. I had seen him drunk many times before—and would again—but this was not drunkenness. I realize now that it was probably an effect of pain medication, or just the accumulated result of all his years of alcohol and drug abuse. But whatever medicine Gaylen may have been taking at this time, it didn’t help much. As we sat and talked, it was plain that he was in acute pain and that his grip on his health was not strong.

  Yet despite his pain, when Gaylen heard about what was happening to Gary as OSP, he paid his brother an immediate visit. He and Gary had a good, reconciliatory meeting. What a scene it must have been: two dead men, sitting, talking to each other, renewing their bonds as brothers. I wish I had been with them.

  Like my mother, Gaylen was outraged and horrified by the impact that the Prolixin was having on Gary. Gaylen stormed into the warden’s office, demanding an end to the treatment. An assistant to the warden assured him that the matter was under review.

  A few days after Gaylen’s visit, the prison psychiatrist made the following notation about Gary: “This patient sustained a quite severe Prolixin reaction and was returned to [the psychiatric unit] on April 5,1971. His Prolixin was stopped, and he made a gradual improvement of his symptomatology. He is scheduled for a Parole Board hearing in May 1971. It is hoped that he will have a complete subsidence of his symptoms by that time. His Prolixin will be stopped as of this date, and appropriate medication will be restarted as his condition warrants in the future. He has no hostile or aggressive thoughts with being on Prolixin, and were he not suffering from the Prolixin reaction, I would recommend his permanent continuance on his medication. He, unfortunately, sustained a moderate
severe reaction which is predictable in a certain few patients. The good effects from the Prolixin I feel have outweighed the bad side effects.”

  IT WOULD BE YEARS BEFORE I LEARNED WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO Gaylen in Chicago—in fact, it was another one of those hidden family secrets I learned from reading The Executioner’s Song. But Mailer didn’t tell the full story. That’s because the only person who knew the full story was my mother, and she wouldn’t divulge all of it to anybody. To this day, despite my best efforts, I have never been able to learn the whole truth of the matter.

  This much, though, I do know: Gaylen got stabbed in Chicago. Horribly, viciously, repeatedly. I have heard different accounts of how this happened. One story has it that Gaylen was drunk and was robbed in an alley late one winter night. One man held him while the other stole his money and jewelry and then rammed an ice pick into his abdomen, over and over. The other story I’ve heard fits in a little better with what I know about my brother. Gaylen had fallen deeply in love with a married woman. He should have learned his lesson from what happened to him in Salt Lake, but of course he didn’t. One day the woman’s husband discovered the affair, tracked down my brother, stabbed him in the lower gut, and left him for dead. It took several quarts of blood and two or three operations to save Gaylen’s life—and the doctors advised him that it was unlikely that he would ever again be able to use his stomach or bowels properly without pain.

  Both of these stories, though, aren’t much more than grim rumors— all that my brother Frank and I have been able to piece together from what we remember of hushed whispers. I have never been able to find the Chicago Police reports or Illinois hospital records about Gaylen’s stabbing. It is likely that Gaylen was living under another name while in Chicago, and nobody seems to know what that name was.