I had known about this story for some time, but I wanted to try to confirm it with the family in Utah, if possible. I had not yet told my brother Frank. I didn’t know how to. At the same time, Frank and I had made a deal to tell each other whatever truths or rumors we learned. He had told me things that had troubled him deeply to tell me. After Utah—where Vern and Brenda confirmed the rumor as much as possible and filled in some of the details—I realized I had to tell Frank what I knew.
During one of our last visits, I told Frank I had something to tell him.
He took a seat. “Is it a shocker?”
I said yes, it was. And then I told him. He took it in quietly for a while. When he spoke, it was in a low voice. “I’d heard Dad insinuate something like that once or twice with Mom. He was screaming it at her at the time, saying that she and Robert had this thing, and that he had always known about it. I’d heard him, but I thought he was just shooting his mouth off, trying to get at her.
“I guess that explains a few things. I guess it explains why I’m kind of fucked up emotionally. And I guess it explains why Mom was always so hard on me. I mean, after Dad died, Gary and Gaylen were in trouble constantly. They were mining her. But she always had a lot of love for them. I was the one that had to bust my ass to try and keep her going as best I could and in turn I got nothing but just hatred, hatred, hatred.”
Frank paused and looked at me, his face in pain. “So this means Dad wasn’t my father. It means my half brother was my father, and Dad was my grandfather. But what I want to know is, since you and I don’t have the same father, does it mean that you’re still my brother?”
“I will always be your brother,” I said, “and you will always be my brother. Nothing will change that. I’m sorry I had to tell you this. I wondered for a long time whether I should. It’s kind of a hard thing to talk about.”
Frank looked down, trying to blink back his tears. “Everything in our family,” he said, “is hard to talk about.”
I HAVEN’T SEEN FRANK SINCE THAT LAST VISIT. I had to go back to Los Angeles to finish my work, and he preferred to stay in Portland. We rarely talkon the phone, because Frank doesn’t have one. We write each other now and then, though. Frank is the better letter writer.
A while back he sent me a letter in which he tried to fill in some of the things about our family life that he had never gotten around to telling me. I read this letter over and over.
Here is some of what it says:
During the time before you were born, when we lived on Crystal Springs Boulevard, Gary and I were attending school not far away, It’s always hard for me to thinkof that school because it reminds me of the time that I saw a young schoolmate killed while he was trying to cross a street called Flavel.
His name was Paul, and he was walking with his father. The next thing I knew, I saw Paul running across the street and then he was hit by a large black car. I remember his father panicking, and I remembered just then that I had forgotten to get my brother Gary at school. I was supposed to bring him home with me but for some reason that I can’t remember, I did not.
Seeing Paul get hit by the car shocked me and confused me. I thought that it was Gary. I ran all the way back to the school screaming that my brother had been killed by a car. I remember some lady with dark hair in her front yard, looking at me with sadness. I found Gary and I was still upset. I told him what happened and we both went home together. I told Mom what had happened. She just looked at me with disgust. She said: “Clean up for dinner. And don’tforget your brother again.” I learned then that when you have something that is bothering you, you never tell your parents about it…
Around this same time Gary and I both had newspaper routes. It lasted for a while, but then Gary got tired of his route, and so one day instead of delivering his papers he just threw them away. That was the end of his route. He got fired, and I remember that Dad was so upset, he beat Gary terribly, for a long time. None of us kids were perfect. But poor Gary, he just seemed to be a little less perfect…
My brother Mikal came into our lives when we were living on Crystal Springs Boulevard. It was before we moved to Utah. Gary and I were listening to the radio when the telephone rang. Dad answered it. A couple of minutes later he came into the room and said, “Well, boys, I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but you have a new brother.” Gary and I were both old enough to know there was a baby on the way, so it was no surprise, but we were still both happy about it.
I remember that a few days later we went somewhere up above 23rd Avenue in northwest Portland, where we picked up both Mom and our new brother, Mikal. I remember that the baby was a lot smaller than I expected, and he was kind of pruned up, but I took a real liking to him. And Dad had found somebody he really loved. Dad really liked Mike, and so did I. I can remember one time when Mike got sick and Dad called the doctor. When the doctor got there he said it was nothing bad, which made us happy. After all, Mike was the family’s baby. However, the doctor did say that he was going to have to give Mike a shot. I remember that it bothered me so much that I had to go outside while he gave him the shot.
I also remember that Mikal used to have a little crib with real high walls around it, so that he could not get out. And no one would ever let him out except me. Every time he would see me he used to get all excited and reach up for me to take him out. As soon as I would lift him up, I remember that his legs would start to go a million miles a minute. By the time he reached the floor, zip, he was gone. I mean everywhere, all over the house, in a flash. It was like he wanted everyone in the family to know that he was free.
11. My days are past, my purposes are
broken off, even the thoughts of my heart.
12. They change the night into day: the
light is short because of darkness.
13. If I wait, the grave is mine house: I
have made my bed in the darkness.
14. I have said to corruption, Thou art my
father: to the worm, Thou art my mother,
and my sister.
15. And where is now my hope? As for my
hope, who shall see it?
16. They shall go down to the bars of the
pit, when our rest together is in the dust.
— BOOK OF JOB, CHAPTER 17
THE TRIAL
A LAST DREAM:
I am attending Gary’s trial. We are in a small, stately chamber in a Utah courthouse, and the room is full of grim, unforgiving faces. They are judges. They are asking Gary—who, in this dream as in real life, is requesting to be put to death—why he committed his crimes, why he was so violent. He seems bemused by the questions, and is unwilling to mount a defense. I am part of his defense team—either an assistant attorney or a witness—and I pass a note to Gary’s main lawyer. “I can tell the truth about this,” I write. “Put me on the stand.”
I go on and I tell what I think will make a difference: I tell the judges how Gary was beaten as a child, how he was forced to watch his mother being beaten, how he was abandoned and abused a thousand times.
Nobody seems to think that what I’m disclosing matters. Gary himself shrugs it off. The judges rule that my testimony is irrelevant. “What happens to the child doesn’t absolve the man,” says one judge.
But then there is a curious flaw in the dream’s logic—or at least in the judges’ logic. The judges learn that Gary has a dark-haired daughter, about three years old. They decide that, as Gary’s offspring, the girl has been too contaminated by him to survive. If Gary wants to die, the judges rule, then his child must die alongside him. Gary accepts this.
I am livid at this decision. I am so angry, I am dragged from the courtroom. I try prevailing on everybody I encounter to see the injustice, the cruelty and the waste of this judgment. But nobody seems unduly bothered by it. Gary is willing to accept the cost of the child’s death to win his own end.
I now no longer care about what happens to my brother. I want to save this child. I try to
fight it until the last moment—until somebody comes to me, standing outside the prison in the dark, and tells me: “The child is dead.”
When I learn this, I break down in a crushed, insatiable grief I cannot believe that this has happened. I cannot imagine life going on or being tolerable in the face of this loss. I can’t live with something this unbearable.
I AWAKEN THEN, MY INSIDES RACKED in a sharp pain. I find I am truly crying. I lie there in the dark sobbing, and though I know no child has actually died, I can’t stop crying. It feels like a real loss, and it feels like I can’t live with it.
I get up and look at the clock. It is four-thirty in the morning. I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of whiskey. I go back and sit up in bed in the darkness. I sit there a long time. I finish my whiskey, slip under the covers, pull a pillow over my head to keep out the horrible morning light I hate so much. I curl up and I tell myself: “It will never be all right. Never. It will never be all right.” I say this to myself over and over, until I find enough comfort in the words that I am able to fall asleep again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY PEOPLE HELPED ME DURING THE PROCESS OF DISCOVERING and telling this story.
Chief among them were my brother, Frank Gilmore, Jr., and Lawrence Schiller and Norman Mailer.
When I went looking for my brother at the end of 1991, after ten years of absence from each other’s lives, I had no idea what his state of heart or mind might be, and I couldn’t begin to guess how he might feel about the prospect of me writing a book about our family past, which we had both done our best to distance ourselves from. Though Frank had some real misgivings about exhuming that past and putting some of its less pleasant aspects forward for public scrutiny, he was amazingly gracious in his willingness to share with me everything he knew about that difficult history. In the end, Frank and I did something like a hundred hours of interviews—if interviews is the right word to apply to two brothers’ intimate conversations—and over the course of those discussions, my own sense of the story I was telling underwent a dramatic change. Frank had no desire to condemn or rehabilitate anybody in our family’s history—himself included; he simply wanted to tell his stories as plainly and evenhandedly as he remembered them. Time and again, I was astonished at his ability for vivid, detailed recall, and I was constantly humbled by his depth and unaffected eloquence.
This book is dedicated to Frank, as it should be. Without his help, I would have told a different, less accurate, and less meaningful story. More important, without his concern, I would not have regained the last bit of family I should never have lost. I am fortunate and proud to call Frank my brother.
Schiller and Mailer’s contribution was also immense, and even more unexpected. In 1977, when Schiller was conducting and compiling interviews and research material for Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, he contacted me on a few occasions, requesting that I sit for an interview with himself and the author. I always declined those requests—and not always politely. In part, I did so for reasons already discussed elsewhere in this book: Larry and I had some bad communications in Utah in the week prior to Gary’s death, and the simple truth is, I chose to hold a grudge. Also, I questioned the merits of an exhaustive look at my brother’s pathology (in fact, I wasn’t yet ready to face examining the sources of all that tragedy). Later, when I read the finished book, I was greatly impressed. Mailer had told a complex and troubling story without imposing a voice or judgment of his own, and Schiller had done a scrupulous job of research. Later, when Schiller’s film version of the book was finished, he offered me an early glimpse of it, and granted me an interview for an article I was writing about the movie for Rolling Stone. In a way, I regretted my earlier decision not to give him an interview for The Executioner’s Song—given his helpfulness, I felt churlish about withholding what I knew about my brother’s life. At the same time, I came to respect Schiller in ways I had not expected to respect him—he served his material truthfully and honorably, and he and Mailer created something monumental from that effort.
In the autumn of 1991, I was discussing with Schiller some of the problems of trying to find the more hidden aspects of my family’s story, when Larry made a remarkable and unsolicited offer: He proposed to let me borrow the original interview tapes of the discussions that he had recorded with both Gary and my mother. He thought such a listening experience might expand my emotional sense of the story, plus it might explain a few of the more bothersome puzzles. Obviously, I was somewhat embarrassed by this offer—after all, I had once declined all of his and Mailer’s requests for help—but I wasn’t so embarrassed that I didn’t jump on the chance. Merely hearing my mother’s and brother’s voices again after so many years, like hearing Frank’s astonishing stories, not only changed how I thought and felt about the people I was trying to rediscover, it also deepened my relationship to them. Additionally, of course, I gathered many significant details and accounts from the tapes, and I have tried to acknowledge those boons at several points in the course of this text. (As much as possible, I have tried not to cover the same ground that Mailer covered in his work, though some shared stories were unavoidable. At the same time, if you want a meticulous and revealing examination of Gary’s misadventures in Utah, The Executioner’s Song is the place to go; it tells a different story than I have told, and it tells it remarkably.)
In addition, both Schiller and Mailer—as well as Mailer’s personal assistant, Judith McNally—remained patient when I wrote and called them at various points, asking if they could help me figure out some of the various perplexing mysteries of my parents’ past. They helped when they could, but sometimes they were as stumped as I was. “Your questions were once my questions,” Mailer replied at one point, and in the end, many of those questions could not be answered. My father and my mother had done a good job of covering their tracks. Whatever Frank and Bessie Gilmore’s best or worst secrets were, they managed to keep them hidden long past their own deaths. I doubt I’ll ever be so lucky.
SEVERAL OTHERS HELPED IN THE HARD AND TEDIOUS WORK of researching this history of lost lives. The following people spent hours helping me dig through files and records and state and institutional bureaucracies for essential materials: Paula Jean Brown, Jennifer Kriegh-Lobianco, Jim Redden, Sheila Rogers, Neil Thompson, and Ewa Wojciak.
Karen Essex organized, read through, and annotated my interviews with my brother Frank. Her comments and observations were always insightful and helped me think about Frank’s stories in new and substantial ways. Karen also helped with many other acts of love and kindness as well.
In addition to my brother Frank, the following people were willing to sit with me and share their remembrances of various people and events in my family’s history: Steve Bekins, Craig Esplin, Duane Fulmer, Tom Lyden, Grace McGinnis, Robert Moody, Larry Olstad, Rich Parker, Norm Rieter, and Roger Shirley. There were others who also gave interviews, but for various reasons, they cannot be identified here. My thanks to all these people for sharing their time and memories.
EARLY ON, WHEN I WAS STILL DEBATING WITH MYSELF about writing this book, several folks offered kind and crucial encouragement and guidance. Among them were: Nancy Clark, James Ellroy, Karen Hall, and Victoria Williams. A dear friend, Helen Knode, suggested this book’s tide. The moment she did, I realized I had found something valuable. For two years now, knowing that tide has helped me draw a center on this story.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I WROTE about the events surrounding my brother’s execution, and the later film version of his life, for Rolling Stone. Portions of those articles appear in revised form in the fifth section of this book, “Blood History.” I would like to thank the following current and former Rolling Stone staffers who helped me in crucial ways with those articles: Barbara Downey, Ben Fong-Torres, James Henke, Sarah Lazin, Terry McDonnell, Susan Murcko, Steve Pond, Bob Wallace, and Jann Wenner.
Rolling Stone helped me keep writing at a time in my life when all I really wanted to do was disappear. M
y thanks to the folks I have worked with at the magazine for their long-standing patience and support.
I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO GIVE THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING: Lee Youngman, for her tour of MacLaren’s School for Boys and her edifying comments about youth violence; Charles Crookham and Jeff Van Valken-burgh at the Oregon State Attorney General’s office, and Robey D. Eldridge at the Oregon Department of Corrections, for their help in obtaining my brother Gary’s prison and medical and psychiatric records; William Drucker, M.D., for sharing with me his knowledge about the complex subject of antipsychotic drug treatment; David Copperfield and Kreskin, for helping me sort out the truth behind the Houdini rumor; L. Kay Gillespie, at Weber State University in Utah, for helping me to understand Mormon Utah’s history of capital punishment (Gillespie is the author of a much recommended volume, The Unforgiven: Utah’s Executed Men); Harry Crews, for his terrific story, “Fathers, Sons, Blood” (in classic crews: a Harry Crews Reader), from which I lifted the tide for this volume’s fifth section, as well as a Goethe quote that I probably would not have found otherwise; and Virginia Campbell, Katherine Dunn, Steve Erickson, Neil Gaiman, Dr. Leonard Lewenstein, Bernadette Megowan, Shannon Riske, Dr. Larry Ryan, and Michael Sugg, for many invaluable hours of conversation, counseling, and perspective. I would also like to thank Alan Pakula, for his early faith and support in this venture.
SEVERAL OTHERS GAVE ME INVALUABLE PERSONAL HELP: my New York cousins, Peter Lancton and his late father, Clarence Lancton, for filling in parts of my grandmother Fay’s history; and in Utah, my uncle Vernon Damico and his daughters (and my cousins) Brenda Wagstaff and Toni Gurney. Vern, Brenda, and Toni gave freely of their time and their memories—memories that still held much real pain for them—and they also made me feel love in a land that my legacy had taught me to hate. I would also like to give special thanks to Nicole Barrett. She gave me a tremendous amount of help and understanding during a difficult period in her life, and her friendship has become irreplaceable. Thanks, Nicole, for putting up with all the trouble and the bad reminders. I owe you love, and more.
Shot in the Heart Page 48
