No, it wasn’t a real ghost. I knew that. But for days after, I couldn’t shake the memory of how it had felt real—like a messenger that had come from another realm, or from my own subconscious, to remind me how much my loss was part of a chain that connected me to a history beyond my own isolated pain. That was the night I began to understand that I had never really escaped my family after all, but that instead I’d carried their ruin deep inside me, maybe from the very beginning. Realizing that was enough to drive me from the land where they were all buried, back to my friends and life in Los Angeles.
I HAD BEEN BACK IN LOS ANGELES A FEW MONTHS when a friend, singer Victoria Williams, called to tell me that A Current Affair—a nationally syndicated program that takes real-life scandal and repackages it into a news-entertainment format—had announced it would be running a segment that night on my brother. The show’s producers had tracked down Nicole Baker and talked her into granting an on-camera interview about Gary and his murders and execution-the first lengthy television interview she had ever granted on the subject.
It came as a bit of a surprise to me that, well over a decade after the fact, Gary’s relationship with Nicole and his death would still be fodder for hot news, but maybe it was just a slow day for topical scandal-mongering. I tuned in the program, expecting something tasteless, and what I saw was certainly that—indeed, it was (at least for me) flat-out enraging. But it was also strangely affecting in ways I had not expected. There was news footage of Gary being led to and from court during the many hearings of those last few months, handcuffed and dressed in prison whites, his wary, appraising eyes scanning the cameras that now surrounded and documented him at every possible opportunity. I remembered watching this footage back in the daze and fury of 1976 and thinking he looked exactly how people thought he looked then: cold-blooded, arrogant, deadly. Seeing these images now, so many years and experiences later, I also saw a couple of things I’m not sure I’d seen very accurately back in those days: namely, that Gary looked plain scared, and he also looked like my brother. That is, he looked like somebody I both loved and hated, somebody who had transformed my life in ways that could never be truly repaired. Mostly, he looked like somebody I had missed very much in the years since his death—somebody I wished I could still sit and talk with, no matter how painful the talking might be.
By and large, though, the segment was sordid and mean-spirited. The point, it seemed, was to try to hang much of the blame for Gary’s murders on Nicole. Nicole described the last time Gary had hit her. She said that she knew right then that she was leaving. “I had been hit before by men,” she said, “and I told myself, ‘I’m leaving.’ No matter what I did, I did not deserve that. He knew that was how I felt. And when I looked at him, I knew that when I go, he will kill someone. I knew that if I left him, somebody would die for it.”
“And yet you left anyway?” the interviewer asked.
Nicole looked off camera for a moment, and I saw that familiar twinge around her eyes, and the start of a broken smile. “One of the greater regrets of my life,” she finally answered.
The interviewer’s implication couldn’t have been plainer: Nicole shared in the blame. Because Gary had lost her, and could not cope with that loss, he killed Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell, rather than turning the murder onto the woman who had left him. And beyond this question and conclusion lay an even more insidious implication: that, somehow, it had been Nicole’s obligation to stay with Gary—to continue to absorb his violence so he would never turn that violence outward, against an innocent world. In other words, the interviewer was saying that Nicole was guilty because she had refused to abide the violence of the man in her life.
Just in case that point wasn’t plain, at the segment’s end the interviewer set up another combination punch. “How could you say you loved somebody so cold-blooded?” he asked.
“There isn’t a day goes by,” said Nicole, “his name doesn’t go through my head. He came into my life, he loved me, and he destroyed all the good that was there.”
“If you could erase Gary Gilmore from your life, would you?”
Again, another broken smile, another glance away, and she shook her head.
“And you say that,” the interviewer asked, “knowing that if you erased Gary those two men would still be alive, those men’s children would still have their fathers …”
Finally Nicole closed off the question. “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Yeah, then I would.”
After that, the camera cut to host Maury Povich, wearing an expression of smug disgust. “Tough to shed a tear for her,” he said.
I think it was the closest I have ever come to smashing my television.
I sat there looking at Povich’s face, and I thought: Nicole never asked for your fucking tears. None of us did: not Gary, not her, not me. Yes, if anybody deserves tears, it is the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell; they deserve not just tears but compassion and support and prayer. But they aren’t the only ones. While you’re at it, I thought, you might try crying for all the people who never really cared to examine how and why these murders happened, and how they might have been prevented. You might try crying for yourself you fucking self-righteous prick, because in a way, just like me, you are a part of the context that helps breed murder in our daily world. And, Mr. Povich, if you cannot feel compassion for Nicole—whom you had no compunction about exploiting in order to draw an audience for your show—you might try showing some compassion, or at least some understanding, for those people who had the possibility of murder jammed deep inside their hearts at an early age, because sometimes murder is the only vintage that can come from an annihilated heart.
I admit that not everything I was thinking in these moments was very gracious, much less terribly rational. I was angry and I was hurting, and I was tired of all the world’s merciless judgments.
I turned off the TV and the lights in my front room and sat there in the dark for hours, thinking. Only a few months before, I had gone through one of the worst chapters of my life—my brief move to Portland and back— and as I reflected on it now, from a little distance, I realized that what had gone wrong had occurred in large part as a result of my past. It was an echo of a ravage that was already in motion long before I was born and, in effect, formed as much my true bond with Gary as any blood tie we might share: that is, we both had been heirs to a legacy of negation that was beyond our sway, maybe even beyond our understanding. Obviously, we each had different ways of dealing with that legacy: Gary ended up turning the nullification outward—in fact, turned it anywhere he could: on innocents, on Nicole, on his family, on me, on the world and its ideas of justice, finally on himself. I had turned the ruin inward, because I had not been allowed—and would not allow myself—to turn it outward. Outward or inward—either way, it was powerfully destructive, and for the first time in my life I came to see that it was not really finished. My family’s ruin did not end with Gary, because it had not started with him.
Sitting there that night, I realized I had grown up in a family that would not continue. There were four sons, and none of us went on to have our own families. We did not go on to spread any legacy or dynasty, to extend or fulfill any of our needs, kind or cruel, damaged or conscientious, through children. We didn’t even have kids in order to beat or ruin them as we had once been beaten or ruined. And though I may have spent years telling everybody that I wanted a family, in part so I could redeem some of the destruction I’d seen in my own home, the simple truth is, I never had that family. I never made the right choices that could have made that dream real, and now I had to wonder if I’d ever really wanted it in the first place. It’s as if what had happened in our family was so awful that it had to end with us, it had to stop, and that to have children was to risk the perpetuation of that ruin. The only way you can kill that ruin truly is to kill yourself. In a way, that’s precisely what Gary and Gaylen did: They ended the family by ending themselves before they could continue the family.
&
nbsp; It is not easy to come to such a place—to feel as if there is something in you that should not continue on the face of this earth, something about yourself that should not survive your own life. Coming to that place, and to that sense of myself and my future, changed my life. I have not been the same since, and I sometimes suspect I will not be the same again.
I DECIDED TO GO BACK TO PORTLAND ONCE MORE—this time to find my brother.
Frank was the last family I had, and I had relinquished him. I had no idea whether he was happy these days or living homeless, whether he was sane or crippled. Too often in my life I had lost those I loved or cared about—sometimes because death took them, sometimes because they gave up their love for me, and sometimes because something in me made it easy to walk away, to withdraw in some irrevocable way from those who might love or need me the most. There were times when it was a frighteningly easy thing to do—something I did almost without thinking—just one of those shameful secrets about myself that I did not fully understand, but now wanted access to.
But the truth is, I missed Frank terribly. I had tried to find him from time to time over the years. I’d get reports that somebody had seen him working someplace, or walking down one road or another in Portland, but I could never track him down anyplace. The last I had heard about him had been a couple of years before. A friend had seen him doing some custodial work. By the time I called the employer, Frank had quit and was gone.
I had no idea what I would find when I found my brother, but I did know I wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him, touch him, see that he was okay and attempt to be fair with him, even if it only resulted in his casting me out of his life for good.
I HAD BEEN IN PORTLAND A SEASON BEFORE I FINALLY FOUND FRANK. I had done everything I knew how to locate him, yet despite a lifetime of reading mystery novels, I wasn’t proving very good at the missing person business. I searched death certificates, I went to homeless shelters, I looked at the face of every man I passed on the street who could possibly be my brother. Then one night not long before Christmas, I was having dinner with Jim Redden, a friend who was a journalist and crime reporter. He offered to make some calls for me. The next morning, when I got up, Redden had left a message on my answering machine. He had found where Frank was living. It was ten blocks from where I was living, in northwest Portland.
I got dressed and walked over to Frank’s address. It may have been only ten blocks, but in those few blocks one walked from one world into another. The area of northwest Portland I lived in was an old part of town, filled with Victorian houses that had been refurbished. It was now an upscale district with shops, cafés, and bars—just another of those self-conscious, affluent bohemian neighborhoods that have sprung up in most American cities over the last decade or two. But as you walk north along 23rd Avenue, you begin to move into the area where the Victorians have not been refurbished—where old homes look simply like old homes, and you come closer to the fringes of northwest Portland’s industrial district. It was a part of town that had stood largely untouched and unloved since the 1940s, and where many older folks and several down-and-outers now congregated, hanging around corner grocery stores that had iron bars across their windows, and guard dogs or guns behind the counters. There were several taverns in the area, and most of them were rough laborers’ hangouts.
Frank lived in the middle of all this, in an old rooming house, situated above a noisy tavern. I had seen places like this before; it was like the places my father had taken me as a child, when he went to find his salesmen. It was the sort of place where new light or fresh air rarely entered. Instead, you found the accrued smells of old men who had come to bide out their time, watching TV, drinking, brooding. The place had a depressing impact on me that felt unexpectedly primal. For a moment, I wanted to run.
I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door that I’d been told was Frank’s. There was no answer. I knocked again, which brought the apartment manager’s attention. He told me that the man who lived there had gone to work and wouldn’t be back until mid evening.
WAITING UNTIL NIGHT TURNED OUT TO BE one of the longest waits of my life. I kept thinking about the place where Frank was living. I tried to imagine the reality of his life. Whatever problems I felt I had, I’d known comfort and social interaction. Life had been good to me in many ways—better than to anyone else in my family.
It seemed amazing to me that the lives of two brothers had taken such different courses. It also seemed terribly unfair. Frank had stayed home and taken care of my mother. Indeed, he was the only one of the brothers who had ever really tried to do the right thing. By contrast, I had simply escaped and looked after myself. I had never thought about taking on the burden of my mother and her problems. For his devotion, Frank had ended up with what looked to me like a devastated life, spent in the company of vagrants and other outsiders. Though I may not have ended up with some of the things I claimed to want in life, the truth is, I had not ended up with nothing. I went places, I did things, I had money in the bank. I was not about to end up in a rooming house.
There’s no point in flogging myself too much here, or apologizing. I don’t believe even now that I would have done anything differently in my life. I think I had to run away from my family in order not to be dragged down by its claims. Still, seeing where Frank lived gave me an idea of what his life must have been like in the last decade, and it did not make me feel good about the distance between us. Nor did it make me feel any better about the prospect of walking back into his life.
I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY DRIVING AROUND, thinking about these things. I wondered what the two of us would have to say to each other after such a long time.
At about nine that night, I returned to the place where Frank lived. At the top of the stairs I nearly bumped into a man who was zipping up a parka jacket and pulling a stocking cap down over his ears in preparation for the cold outside. I studied the face quickly—a habit I’d picked up in recent months—and I saw something I’d seen so many times in my mind’s eye over the years: a face deep-cut with the lines that come from bad history. I saw the face of my brother.
“Frank,” I said. He looked up. I could tell he didn’t know who I was.
“Frank, it’s me, Mikal.” He stood there, staring at me, his face pulled into a questioning look, as if he didn’t believe what I said. I think if he had reached out and shoved me down the stairs I probably would not have resisted him. I would have thought it was okay.
Instead, he reached out and took me in his arms, and held me. In that moment, the squalor around us didn’t matter. In that moment, I felt like I was in the embrace of home.
A HALF HOUR LATER WE WERE SEATED in the warmth of my apartment. Frank hadn’t wanted me to see the room where he lived.
As he entered my place, Frank looked around, taking in the clutter of books and CDs, and the electronic and computer equipment. “Man,” he said, smiling, “you’re kind of like Mom. It looks like you don’t ever throw anything away.”
We sat on my sofa, sipping warm drinks, talking. Frank said he had heard I was married, and he wanted to know about my wife. I explained to him that the marriage had been over for a long time, and that it had been one of those honest but sad mistakes that people make. “Geez, man,” Frank said, stirring his coffee, “I’m really sorry to hear that. No children?” I said no, and he lapsed momentarily into silence.
I asked what had happened to him since I had last seen him. He shrugged and cleared his throat. “Oh, I’ve just sort of drifted around for the most part, spending a few months here, then there. For a few years after Mom’s death, I got into drinking a lot. I felt pretty bad about her dying. I felt responsible in some ways, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind. She had hated and feared hospitals. I sent her to one and she died. Maybe if I hadn’t, I thought, she would have had a chance. I sold the trailer afterward and just took off. I guess I spent years that way-traveling, working, drinking. I spent a lot of time on the streets. Got into a couple of fig
hts. Had my arms broken twice. Got jumped on once by a bunch of fucking skinheads. They took everything I had.”
Frank paused and smiled a gentle smile that was in startling contrast to the litany of horror he had just recited. “I guess I simply went a little crazy during those years. Then I got to thinking about all the other stuff, about Gaylen dying as such a young man, and Gary doing all those horrible things he did … I had people I barely knew come up to me and ask the most terrible questions. ‘Is it true that your brother did those awful things? How could you have lived in the same home with a man like that?’ A couple of times, when I was working at a job, somebody would figure out I was Gary’s brother. They would want to get in fights with me, like somehow beating me made them bigger or tougher than Gary, or punished him more. A few months ago, I was working a job over in Salt Lake City, and when somebody figured out I was related to Gary, they fired me.”
As Frank talked, I felt the past sitting in the room with us. Maybe he felt it too, because he got up and started to move around. He walked around my apartment looking at things, until he came to the dining table, where I had sprawled several of the photos from our family albums. For some reason, I’d become the caretaker of these pictures. They were all I had left of the family’s possessions. I’d spent a lot of time recently studying these photos, trying to read them for clues to the riddles of our lives.
“I’d wondered what happened to these,” said Frank, picking up one of the pictures and looking at it. “I don’t have many of these left. I’ve traveled so much, had so much stolen or lost. I think about all I have left is a picture of you as a baby, in your playpen with your rubber toad. Do you remember that?”
Shot in the Heart Page 46
