Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  The next day at school, Jim didn’t show up. Charlie approached Gary between classes and seemed to want to talk about the whole affair but didn’t know what to say. He walked up to my brother, looked at him, and then turned around and walked away. Twenty-three years later, after telling Larry Schiller about his friendship with Charlie and Jim, Gary said: “Charlie was a pretty sensitive kid, and it’s like he’d seen something he didn’t want to see. Something that was more than just a fight, which at first he was enjoying. We’d fought all the time. But this was the most vicious fight I’d ever been in as a kid, and I don’t know what would have happened if Charlie hadn’t gone in and got Jim’s dad. The way Charlie looked at me the next day, it was like he’d seen something he didn’t understand.”

  GARY’S MISADVENTURES CONTINUED.

  In early 1954, he ran away from home and was picked up by the police in Burley, Idaho. It is one of the few early incidents in Gary’s life that my brother Frank can recall nothing about, and I have no idea what the reason was for Gary’s running away. Most likely, he had simply taken one beating too many and decided to find a better reality somewhere else. Maybe he and everybody else would have been better off had he never been caught. Chances are, though, he would simply have come back on his own. The ruin was already in his blood, and he couldn’t quit it.

  After that, Gary’s life was one long unbroken chain of trouble until the day he died.

  The following summer, after school had let out for the season, Gary and a couple other friends visited Joseph Lane early one evening and threw rocks at the school windows. “We weren’t going to leave any windows unbroken in that place,” one of the friends said, many years later. The school pressed charges. Though there was no doubt about Gary’s guilt in the affair, my father hired a private investigator to prove that his son had been out of town at the time of the incident. He also went to the extraordinary length of hiring a lawyer to defend Gary on the matter in juvenile court. The court was offended by the extravagance of my father’s actions, but just as Fay had once saved her son from jail time many years before, Frank Gilmore got Gary off the hook for his vandalism.

  My brother Frank recalls: “All Dad or anybody cared about was Gary not going to jail, as much for what that would do to the family’s reputation as for any other reason. I think everybody saw that Gary was going down the road of shortcuts to hell. They just kind of took it for granted, like it was something that was supposed to happen. I don’t remember anybody taking him aside and saying, ‘Listen, if you keep going this way, you could end up on death row.’ I don’t remember that anybody was all that concerned about Gary’s fate at all. All they cared about was preserving the family’s name.”

  AT SOME POINT during the first year or two that my family was settled into the new house on Johnson Creek, a visitor came around. My mother opened the front door one day to find the same man she had seen six years before, seated at the diner in Sacramento. He was still thin, still well-groomed. Up close, Bessie saw that the man had light blue eyes and an attractive, close-mouthed smile, much like her husband. Yes, she thought, looking at this face that both scared and attracted her, this could indeed be one of Frank Gilmore’s missing sons.

  “I’m here to see Frank,” the man announced.

  Before she could answer, my father was standing by her side. “It’s okay, Betty,” he said. “This is somebody I’ve been expecting.”

  My father took the stranger into his office and shut the door behind them. My mother had learned to accept her husband’s secretive ways—or at least she had learned that prying was simply a futile process; if Frank Gilmore didn’t want to talk about something, he didn’t talk about it. For too many years, though, she had lived with the burden of his secret without knowing the truth behind it, and her curiosity was too strong to resist. Next to my father’s office was the staircase that went to the upstairs bedrooms. My mother could sit there and overhear a good part of what was being discussed in the office without being detected.

  The man and my father talked for about an hour. The man’s name, my mother learned, was Clarence. She couldn’t understand everything that was being said, but she heard enough to get a fair idea of what my father’s business with this man was, and what had kept him on the run for so long. I’ll never eavesdrop again, she thought to herself, as she moved from the stairs and went to sit at the kitchen table.

  After the man left, my father found my mother sitting at the table, staring into her cold cup of coffee. He poured his own cup and sat down beside her. He looked suddenly ten years younger. “Well, that was some good news,” he announced. “That was somebody who came to talk to me about an old debt that I owed. But it’s all been settled now. We don’t have to move around anymore if we don’t want to. I think we can stay here and make Portland our home now.”

  My mother kept staring at the table. “Frank,” she said, after several moments, “you can be as angry as you like, but I listened in on some of your conversation with that man. All I can say is, I wish I hadn’t heard what I just heard.”

  For once, Frank didn’t seem angry. In fact, he seemed almost relieved. “It all happened a long time ago, Betty,” he said. “I was younger then, drinking more than you’ve ever seen me drink, and I was foolish. I suppose I was desperate, too. It all seemed so easy at first. By the time I realized what I was truly involved in, I was on the run. Running is all I’ve ever known since that time. Running, hiding, living under different names, trying to keep in touch with some people while also trying to lose others. All the time, I kept looking to find a way to make up for it.”

  He sighed and sipped at his coffee. “Anyway, that visit I just had means that I’m finally free of it. We don’t have to worry about it ever again. And we don’t have to talk about it ever again.”

  “Don’t worry,” my mother said. “I won’t ever say anything about it to anybody. Nobody would believe me anyway. But the next time you’re beating Gary for getting into trouble, you might ask yourself where he got all that from. I think he got the trouble from your blood, Frank. I think he’s your walking shadow.”

  My mother kept her promise. Whatever she had learned that day about Frank Gilmore’s secret, she would never fully declare to anybody. One time, though, a few months after my father’s death, she had a phone conversation about the matter with my father’s attorney. Gary was in the house the night she received the call—it was during the last few days of freedom he would ever enjoy with our family—and something about my mother’s hushed tone made him think this was a conversation he should listen in on. While Bessie talked upstairs, Gary picked up the downstairs phone, and learned the same hidden truths my mother had learned years before.

  When my mother came downstairs, she saw Gary sitting in the dark, his hand still on the phone. “Were you listening in on my conversation?” she asked.

  Gary nodded.

  “Damnit, Gary, why are you always where you shouldn’t be?”

  Gary didn’t say anything at first. By this time, he was already a hardened man who had spent many seasons in jail. He was no stranger to theft, drugs, violence, or the criminal rationale. But the conversation he had overheard, my mother could see, had clearly shaken and saddened him. “Man,” Gary said, “I knew Dad could be a real bastard. That was bad enough, but it would have been okay remembering him that way—as a bastard who didn’t love me. I didn’t need to know this about the old man.”

  “I’m sorry you had to learn this about your father,” my mother said, “but you shouldn’t judge him too harshly. This is something that he tried to protect us from for many years. I don’t think you would be doing your brothers any favors to share it with them. Don’t ruin what good memories they have left of their father.”

  Like my mother, Gary kept the secret. No matter how terrible another man’s crimes were, Gary would never divulge somebody else’s trespasses. He had learned the code of silence well, both at home and in jail, but I have sometimes thought that what my mother and Gary l
earned about Frank Gilmore did something to them, haunted them in ways they couldn’t erase and couldn’t admit. In the last few years of her life, my mother referred over and over to the horrible mystery that surrounded my father, as if it were something she felt could still rise up and hurt us all. And on the last day of his life, Gary’s final comment about his father said much regarding the cost he had paid for being Frank Gilmore’s son. “My father was the first person I ever wanted to murder,” Gary told our Uncle Vern in his last few hours. “If I could have killed him and got away with it, I would have.”

  MY BROTHER GARY SPENT the first half of 1955 trying to cram as much experience into his life as possible. Looking back, it makes a sort of sad sense. These were among the last free months of his adolescence. For that matter, they were among the last free months he would know for the next twenty years.

  In February, Gary quit school and hitchhiked with a friend to Texas, with my parents’ permission. Gary’s first few months at Franklin High School had been a full-force disaster, and my mother thought that maybe if Gary got away and worked out some of his restlessness, he would soon settle down. By this time, my father simply liked the idea of Gary being gone for a while.

  The trip was brief, but it became one of the legends that Gary later told about his youth. His main objective was to see McCamey, the oil workers town he had been born in. Along the way, he later said, he and his friend got picked up by a man who tried to make a sexual move on them. Gary said he beat up the guy, dumped him at the side of the road, and took his car into Odessa. Within a few days, Gary and his friend were running a poker game out of a hotel and making enough money to keep themselves stocked in liquor and hookers. Then the boys got homesick and made their way back to Portland, hitching rides and hopping freights.

  Back home, Gary and a couple of other friends started a small car-theft ring. They would steal a car, repaint it, drive it for a few days, then abandon it and steal another. Once, for the hell of it, they stole the same car ten nights in a row, always returning it to the owner’s driveway before dawn. In early May, they got caught at their dangerous hobby and were hauled into court. My father was adamant that it was all a big mistake, that Gary had been an unwitting accomplice in the whole affair. The judge was inclined to be lenient and released Gary to my father, with a warning.

  Two weeks later, Gary was back in court again on another car-theft charge—stealing a 1948 Chevrolet. Once more, my father insisted that Gary could not be guilty, but this time the judge was not so tolerant. The court ordered that Gary be committed to MacLaren’s Reform School for Boys, in Woodburn, Oregon, for an indefinite period, and also ordered my father to pay thirty-five dollars a month to finance Gary’s stay at the institution. My father was furious and called the judge a few choice names, and the judge had my father thrown out of court.

  After the sentencing, the judge sent MacLaren’s supervisor a letter, stating the following:

  The boy had come to this court’s attention for delinquent behavior on several occasions. Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore consistently refused any counseling from the court and simply refused to believe the clear facts with reference to their son’s delinquency on several occasions. The attitude of Mr. Gilmore particularly left no alternative to the court other than commit the boy to MacLaren. He is simply carrying through the same attitude by endorsement on the back of his check, which reads: “Blood money to the State by compulsion, under protest.” Thirty-five dollars per month is less than Mr. Gilmore should reasonably be expected to pay for his son at home, and I believe Mr. Gilmore is fortunate not to have to pay more upon his obligation. If he fails to make these payments, as required, I certainly expect that he will be cited into my court to show a reason why he should not be found in contempt.

  In other words, Gary was being punished as much to teach my father a lesson as for his own errors. The sins of the fathers, indeed—and the sins of the judges.

  FOLLOWING HIS SENTENCING, Gary was manacled to another boy, placed in the back seat of a state police car, and driven the forty miles south to Woodburn. In those days, MacLaren’s sat not far off the main highway. It was a sprawling estate, full of green lawn and walnut trees, and hemmed in at the front by an eight-foot-high stone wall. The police car made its way down the school’s entry road, past the main administration building and the various cottage dormitories, to a reception cottage on the rear grounds. There, Gary and the other boy were turned over to a burly, balding man whom I’ll call Mr. Blue. Standing by Blue’s side was a big German shepherd, which immediately jumped up and put its paws on Gary’s chest and bared its teeth in his face. Gary tried to raise his manacled hands to ward off the animal, but Mr. Blue delivered a stern warning. “You are not allowed to touch the dog, even if you’re trying to defend yourself,” Mr. Blue said. “In fact, if you make any sudden or threatening moves, the dog will probably tear you to pieces.” The dog sniffed each boy in turn, then went back and sat beside its master. “Mr. Blue had this cockeyed theory,” another MacLaren’s inmate told me years later. “He believed that if we could relate to a dog we could start to relate to other people. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea, though I think it might have worked better if the dog was smaller and less aggressive, and didn’t seem like it was just waiting for a chance to bite your nuts off.”

  Gary and the other boy were then herded into an adjoining room with other staff members. The boys were told to strip off their clothes, and then the supervisors ran their fingers through the boys’ hair, checking for lice. “Okay,” said Blue, “now bend over and reach back and spread your butt cheeks.” Blue walked along behind the boys, carrying a yardstick. He lightly batted the boys’ scrotums with the yardstick, then raised the ruler and tapped at each boy’s anus. “Looks like we have a bunch of tight asses here,” Blue said to the other staff, and all the men laughed.

  Next, each boy showered and was issued his uniform—boxer shorts, blue jeans, and a green denim shirt—and then Gary and the others took turns sitting in a chair, while a supervisor wielded an electric razor and burred the boys’ hair down to nothing, like a marine-style cut. After that, the boys were led into what was called the squad room. It was about fifty by twenty-five feet and was full of maybe fifty-five other kids, milling around on the floor or sitting on a few tables. On one side of the room was a row of toilets, with no walls separating them from the rest of the room, no barriers that would allow privacy. This was the room where all the incoming boys spent their spare time for their first few weeks at MacLaren’s, while the counselors determined which of the school’s other cottages each boy would be assigned to. There were a few chessboards and card decks in the room for entertainment, but that was all. No books, no television, no radio.

  At the end of the evening, the boys were taken upstairs to the dormitory sleeping quarters, and the newcomers were assigned their beds. Each wall of the room was lined with small individual beds, laid in close formation. In the center of the room stood a guard’s booth, protected with bulletproof glass and prison bars. Periodically throughout the night a supervisor would come in and make the rounds of the beds, or sit inside the booth, watching the sleeping kids. Inside the booth was a phone. All the supervisor had to do was lift the phone and he was in immediate touch with the state police station down the road.

  At 9 P.M. the boys hung up their uniforms and slipped into dressing gowns. “Stay in your beds,” Blue told the new boys. “If you need to use the bathroom, wait and ask a supervisor when he comes around. And no talking once the lights go out.”

  A few minutes later, Gary was lying there in the dark. He was probably already thinking how he could get out of this place. After a few moments, he noticed a curious sound—a noise like something being rubbed vigorously, accompanied by a chorus of rapid breathing and a few odd giggles. Next thing he knew, something hot and viscous hit him across his face. Then another warm, wet stream landed on him, running into his eyes and his nostrils. It was the semen of the boys in the beds that flanked his own.
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  This was Gary’s introduction to MacLaren’s “cum fights.” Several nights a week, as soon as the lights went out, the boys would pull down their blankets and pull out their penises. They would stroke themselves as fast as they could, trying to pump up to an immediate ejaculation— something like the ultimate boy’s race. Whoever came first had an advantage: He would catch his shooting semen on his hand and fling it in a nearby opponent’s face, sometimes effectively disarming the other boy’s rhythm of masturbation. But the worst targets were newcomers. It was part of their initiation. On a boy’s first night, he would likely find his face drenched with semen. If he tried to cover up, a few boys might hold him until the others could finish masturbating, and then wipe their semen all over the boy’s face. Sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty boys would douse a rookie. The supervisors were never in the room when the cum fights took place. Maybe they never knew about the activity. In any event, the practice was never acknowledged in MacLaren’s records.

  A LITTLE AFTER 1 A.M., Gary was awakened by a movement in the dark. He looked up and saw Mr. Blue, walking down the aisle between the beds. He was carrying a small stool with him, like the kind you place alongside a cow when you milk it. He paused alongside Gary’s bed, and Gary shut his eyes, feigning deep sleep. Blue moved away, down the row to another boy’s bed. In the room’s dim light, Gary could see Blue sit down on his stool and whisper something to the boy. Gary rolled back over and shut his eyes again.

  According to somebody who had been at MacLaren’s at the same time as Gary, Blue’s nighttime visits were not uncommon. “My first night there,” this person told me, “Mr. Blue came up with his stool and sat down by my bed. He reached out and grabbed me by the thigh, and squeezed me, and then in a very quiet voice said: ‘How are you doing?’ I took his hand and moved it away. Blue got mad. He grabbed me again, this time harder, and said: ‘I’ll squeeze your leg if I feel like it.’ I said: “No, you won’t. I have a family. They won’t like it.’ Blue glared at me for a moment, then gave me an extra hard squeeze and pulled his hand away.