Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  “I saw this same guy on the street a couple years ago. He asked me if I remembered that incident. I could see that Gary’s little act had left its mark on him, and I still felt embarrassed that my brother had done that.”

  After one incident too many, Lyden either hit Gary or threatened to hit him. “Gary and I went into it, I know that much,” said Lyden. “There just comes a point when you have to say to a kid, ‘Okay, that’s it—this is the consequence of your behavior.’ ”

  At eleven-thirty that night, Lyden got a call from my father. He was in a rage. “Tomorrow,” my father told Lyden, “when you come to school, I’m going to blow your goddamned head off.”

  “Strangely enough,” Lyden told me, “I went to school the next day, and it didn’t intimidate or frighten me. I guess I was pretty naive.” Frank Gilmore didn’t make good on his threat, but he did send along another message to the teacher: “Do not ever touch my youngster again. If there’s any touching to be done, I’ll do it.”

  Lyden paused and glanced again at the photo of his old class. “I remember that I always felt sorry for your brother Frank,” he said, “but I never felt sorry for Gary. One night after a school dance, my wife and I were driving along and we saw Frank walking home by himself in the dark. I recall thinking that if he and Gary had been close, wouldn’t they have walked home together? Frank was walking along alone that night, his head bent down, his shoulders stooped. He looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his back, and he was just a kid. I remember thinking, ‘He’s the one who never gets any attention.’ Gary always got a lot of attention. Much of it was negative, but negative attention is still attention.”

  Many years later, when Gary was on Utah’s death row and was news all over the nation, Tom Lyden was following the story as closely as anyone. The day Gary was shot, Lyden felt a special pang. No matter what Gary had done, he hated to see him come to this end. That same day, he got a call from Larry Schiller in Provo, Utah. Schiller wanted to talk to somebody who could tell him something about Gary’s childhood. At first, Lyden was surprised that Gary had even remembered him, but what Schiller said next devastated the teacher: Gary had told Schiller and his lawyers that Tom Lyden was the teacher he had most valued and respected. In fact, he cited Lyden as one of the few people he had reached out to for help, but my brother realized he had probably been too recalcitrant for the teacher, and he felt bad that he had let Lyden down.

  “At that time in 1977,” Lyden said, “I was principal at Rose City Park School, in Portland, and we had a kid there who was a real problem to us and to himself and to his school. I had wanted the two teachers involved to reach out more for this boy, but they’d had it up to here and just wanted to get rough with him and turn him over to the authorities. The day after I got the call from Mr. Schiller, we had a staff meeting about this kid and I told those teachers the story. I said, ‘Yesterday, I got a telephone call about Gary Gilmore. Gary told somebody that he once had an eighth-grade teacher whom he’d held his hand out to, and that teacher didn’t quite reach for it. He said he thought that perhaps that teacher could have made the difference in his life. That teacher was me. Now, what are you going to do about this youngster?’ After that, they were falling all over themselves to reach for that kid.

  “In all the years since then, I’ve never forgotten the lesson that Gary taught me,” said Lyden. “I have always told teachers, ‘Take all the steps that you’re capable of, and then take one more. If this were your kid, you would want people to keep reaching for him.’ ”

  I HAVE STUDIED THE picture of Gary that Tom Lyden gave me many times. No other image of my brother has ever torn my heart more or made me feel closer to him. It captures one of those few moments in Gary’s life that I can readily identify with, because it’s one of the few in which I can easily find myself. The first thing about the photo that strikes me is that I had a face that was almost identical to Gary’s at the same age. Gary wasn’t smiling in the picture, he didn’t look like he belonged with these people in this place, and that was a feeling I carried about my own identity throughout all the years I attended school. Everything about the way he held himself in the picture—the way he pulled his body back from the grouping of the other students, the way he was looking intently at something outside of the photo’s frame, some distraction that interested him more than joining the gaze of his friends—all this says that he was a boy who felt different from the people and the values around him. Some of that, no doubt, was a pose. Gary wanted to be respected, but he didn’t want to be regarded as square or nice or ordinary. Instead, he wanted to be feared—probably because that was the only thing that could give him a little parity in his life. He had spent so much time feeling fear and being brutalized that he was ready to return those favors to the world around him.

  I look at this picture and I feel both sorrow and anger. For the life of me, I cannot understand why somebody didn’t value this kid enough to offer him something other than scorn and the rod. Gary was a smart kid in a time and place that did not value his brand of intelligence. He was smart and brave enough to want to rebel—to fuck things up as a way of declaring how things had fucked him up—but the world was not going to accommodate or tolerate that rebellion. It was going to see it as simple disobedience, and it was going to destroy that spirit, or take revenge on it. When I look at this photograph, I see a damaged boy. Or more accurately, I see the face of a broken angel as it looks away from the easy certainty that everyone else is looking toward and contemplates taking on the devil’s face for a lifetime fit.

  IN SPRING EVENINGS after school, as the daylight hours stretched longer, Gary and his friends began hanging out in the woods behind Johnson Creek. They would take girls into hidden groves and they would sneak along bottles of beer or whiskey. Gary had a little camera he had stolen from my father, and whenever he could, he would talk the teen-aged women into posing for pictures in the nude. Within a few days, Gary would be passing the photos around school. “That was a big thing in those days,” says Frank. “Most kids didn’t have stuff like that. Gary was living the way that people twenty years old would be living, for example. In that sense, he was real popular with the guys because he was kind of a century ahead of us.”

  Deeper in the woods there was an old train trestle, crossing the creek’s swimming hole. Sometimes, after Gary had a few drinks, he would climb out on the trestle and wait for the train to come along. He would stand in the middle of the span until the moment the train would hit the start of the bridge, then he would race to the opposite end, jumping to one side at the last possible second, as the train reached the other bank. He did this frequently, and he had several close calls as the train’s engine bore down on him. Word about Gary’s bravado got around Joseph Lane, and kids would come to the trestle in the early evenings to watch him race the train. Nobody else would risk matching the feat. Some of the kids admired Gary for his recklessness, but others began to keep a distance from him after they witnessed him make the run. They realized that a boy who did not seem to fear the momentum of a train might be too dangerous to get close to.

  One day Frank went to watch his brother run along the trestle, and when he saw how close Gary let the trains come to hitting him, Frank was terrified. “I tried to talk to him,” he told me. “I didn’t want to see him get killed. Showing off was one thing, but this was suicidal.” Gary kept racing the trains. Finally, Frank went to my mother with his concerns. “We weren’t tattletales on each other,” he said, “but I was afraid Gary was going to get killed, so I asked her to talk to him. But I told her not to tell Dad, because he would just have got out his razor strap and made a big thing out of it, and what would that have accomplished?” Bessie finally prevailed on Gary that it would be an easy matter for his foot to get caught in the tracks and for him to end up ground under the engine’s razorlike wheels. Gary promised my mother and brother he wouldn’t outrun the trains anymore. But I’m willing to bet he kept on awaiting engines on the trestle, unt
il something equally nihilistic caught his fancy.

  IN PORTLAND IN THOSE days, if you were a teenager interested in proclaiming your lawlessness or toughness, the hippest thing you could do was join the Broadway Gang. A combination street gang and car club, the Broadway Boys—as they were also known—dressed in pachuco-style clothes and hung out late at night on Portland’s main avenue, outside a restaurant called Jolly Joan’s. Though some of its members occasionally stole cars, sold drugs, and ran prostitutes, the Broadway Gang was perhaps more obnoxious than it was genuinely dangerous. “They were just little street bastards,” one of Gary’s friends told me. “They used to raise hell downtown, you know, push people around, and they were just bastards. Every once in a while one of them might flash a switchblade. But they were not used except for show. I never heard of any of the Broadway Boys ever using a knife on anybody.”

  My brother Gary longed to join this gang. Whether he actually knew any of the group’s members at the time, nobody seems to know. Still, even to talk about enlisting in such an outfit enhanced his outlaw standing among his peers. After school, when Gary and his friends would meet at the swimming hole and drink beers, my brother boasted that he knew that the Broadway Gang members needed guns. If Gary could supply them with a few pistols, he claimed, then he could join their league.

  Gary took on an after-school paper delivery route, for the purpose of finding homes that might have guns he could steal. He learned to watch the houses on his route carefully, to become familiar with the comings and goings of the residents—when they took dinner or left on a vacation. It was at this time, at about age twelve or thirteen, that Gary began to break into houses. He would look for an unlocked or easy-to-jimmy window, then he would pry it open and climb inside. He liked those first few moments, standing in the stillness and darkness of somebody else’s home, feeling the power of violation that he brought to their world. He soon learned that breaking into homes was a good way of learning other peoples’ secrets—where the residents hid their money or dirty books or photos, what size brassiere the blond girl in his homeroom class wore, whether her parents were heavy drinkers or Bible freaks, or both. He’d feel the intimacy of their underwear, he’d taste their liquor, he’d pocket some of their pornography. To Gary’s disappointment, though, he never found any handguns in those homes. It was a time when most Americans hadn’t yet armed themselves, in fear of the world outside.

  For some reason, Gary became convinced that the house down at the corner of our street, right next to the small grocery store, had a collection of guns stowed away in a trunk in its garage. One night, Gary talked a friend of his named Dan into breaking into the garage with him and cracking the lock on the trunk. They didn’t find any guns, but the family that owned the house somehow figured out that it was Gary who violated their place, and they went to the police with their suspicion. The neighbors raised a lot of hell, but since nothing had been stolen and nothing could be proven, the juvenile authorities let Gary off with a warning: He was starting to get a bad reputation for himself, they told him, and from here on out, they would be keeping an eye on him.

  ONE NIGHT AROUND Halloween 1954, Gary was waiting for the trolley back home, at the depot in downtown Portland. It was close to Portland’s Skidrow, a rough slum area of town. The trolley only came once an hour, so it was a long wait—long enough to look at all the shop windows in the nearby district. Down the block from the station there was a pawn shop, its window full of .22 rifles. Gary saw a Winchester semi-automatic he liked. A beautiful gun, but at a price much higher than he could afford. It was already past midnight. The streets were quiet, deserted. He was the only person within howling distance. He wandered over to a deserted building and sorted through its rubble until he found a brick and then came back and threw the brick through the window. No alarm went off, nobody reacted. He climbed in, grabbed his Winchester, then filled a paper bag with a few boxes of cartridges. He cut his hand in the process of climbing through the window, but he didn’t much mind.

  Gary found a newspaper in the shop. He dismantled the gun—it broke into two parts—wrapped it in the paper and stuffed it in a large shopping bag. It looked like a paper bag of laundry or groceries. Then he waited for the trolley and rode with his rifle and bullets back to John son Creek. When he got off the trolley, Gary walked into the woods and hid his gun and ammunition in a place where he also often hid the items he stole from the neighborhood’s homes and grocery stores. He could not chance having the rifle in our house, in case my father might discover it.

  The next day Gary told his brother Frank and a few of his friends— Dan and two other pals, Charlie and Jim—about the rifle he had stolen. Frank wanted nothing to do with the matter; he didn’t even want to see the gun. But Gary’s other friends felt differently. One night, as the Oregon sky was turning from indigo to black, Gary met his friends at Johnson Creek’s swimming hole and showed them his gun. The small group made their way through the woods over to the tracks and then up the tracks to the Johnson Creek trolley station, which was located across the road and a few hundred feet down the way from our home. The station was a three-sided timber construction—a weather shelter, with an overhanging light. Gary lay on the tracks, with his friends behind him. He aimed at the station’s lamp through a side window in the building. He squeezed the trigger, and the lamp exploded. A woman came running out of the station as fast as she could. Gary kept shooting her way, laughing all the time.

  For the next couple of weeks, Gary and his friends would meet at the swimming hole and Gary would fire his rifle at tin cans and paper targets. He got to be a good shot. But he soon tired of having to hide his treasure. One afternoon he sat by the swimming hole with Charlie and Jim, and he stared at his rifle. It felt spoiled to him, and he no longer wanted it. He asked his friends: “Listen, if I throw this gun here in the crick, do you guys have the guts to jump in there and dive for it?”

  “You’re goddamn right,” said Charlie. “As soon as you throw it in.”

  Gary could tell they thought he was kidding. He took the rifle barrel in his hand and swung the gun in a long arc over the creek. It hit the water about six feet from the bank, right past a big, sharp rock that jutted up out of the swimming hole. His two friends just stood there, staring at the place where the gun had disappeared. They were amazed that Gary had tossed away the rifle he loved so much. “Go on,” said Gary. “You can have the gun if you dive for it.” Jim jumped for the place where the gun had sunk, but he landed on his knee on the sharp rock. It gashed his leg open, and Charlie had to help him back to the bank. Gary laughed his head off. Thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Nobody ever retrieved the Winchester. It still lies past the sharp rock, at the bottom of Johnson Creek’s swimming hole.

  The friendship with Charlie and Jim didn’t last much longer. On Gary’s fourteenth birthday several weeks later, my mother and father allowed him a party at our home. The only two guests he invited were Charlie and Jim. For his present, his friends told him they were going to pay his way to a movie. When the three of them were halfway to the movie house, Charlie and Jim told Gary they were just kidding and were going to spend the money on themselves and not on him. They ran off and left him there, at the top of 45th Avenue, overlooking the tangle of brambles that he had climbed his way through a few months before. Gary walked back home. When he came in through the kitchen back door, my mother asked him what had happened. He said, “I don’t ever want another fucking birthday party as long as I live,” and then went up to his bedroom.

  A couple days later, Gary and Charlie and Jim were at Jim’s parents’ house, playing around. They were out back, in an old trailer that the kids used as a play area, and they were wrestling. Gary had learned a few new moves at school and had a trick he wanted to show. He told Jim, “Get me in a full nelson and I’ll show you how quick I can get out of it.” As it turned out, the trick didn’t work, and Jim didn’t break the hold. Gary told him, “Okay, let go,” but Jim started to apply more
pressure, like he was really going to show Gary. Just like that, Gary went crazy. He got out from under Jim and clambered on top of him. He got a grip around Jim’s throat and began to choke him and pound his head against the ground. Jim passed out and Gary continued beating on his face. Charlie stood there watching the violence until he decided it had gone too far, then ran in the house, yelling for help. Jim’s father came out, a big man named Buck. He hit Gary. Then he lifted my brother up by the back of the neck and held him in one hand, his other fist doubled. Gary could tell the man wanted to punch him hard. But he didn’t. Instead, Buck helped up his son, who was choking and bleeding and gasping for breath. Gary had given him quite a beating. Jim’s father asked his son if he wanted to go out in the yard and finish it, but Jim backed down in front of his dad. Gary didn’t say anything, but he was ready to fight more. He could see that Buck didn’t like the fact that his son wouldn’t fight anymore. The father turned on Gary and said: “Leave right now, and don’t ever come around here again.”

  Gary didn’t say anything. He got on his bike and left. The incident didn’t bother him much, but he remembered thinking that Jim’s father had looked at him in a way that a grown-up shouldn’t look at a child. Somehow, it made my brother feel good, like he had accomplished something.