Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  “One of the last times I saw Gary,” Duane told me, “we were having lunch together in one of the cafeterias, and he was trying to talk me into joining him in L.E.D. He was telling me how much he liked it there, and I knew that was bullshit. Who could like being locked up twenty-four hours a day? Also, everybody knew that if we had any cases of serious perversion going on, it was in L.E.D. But Gary insisted it was a great life. He said, ‘Man, Duane, we get to smoke and swear as much as we want there. We don’t have to live by the same rules. We don’t even have to go to school or work.’ What he didn’t seem to understand was, those weren’t privileges. That treatment was the school’s way of saying that the boys in L.E.D. were beyond saving. They could smoke and they could swear, but those kids were locked up, and they would stay there until the authorities were ready to let them go.”

  ONE OF THE INCIDENTS associated with Gary’s stay at L.E.D., Duane said, involved a fight. “If you got into a fight at MacLaren’s, the supervisors would never step in. I remember watching twenty minutes of amazingly brutal combat between two rough Medford logger kids, with everybody cheering and the supervisor standing back, sucking on a cigarette, getting his jollies watching these two kids beating each other half to death. I think the supervisors handled it that way because they saw it as a pressure release. If they stifled these things the tension would build up and sides would be formed, and they might end up with a first-class riot or gang fight on their hands. All I know is, the fights that I was in and the fights I witnessed at MacLaren’s were savage. They were fights to the finish, because you knew there’d be nobody there to protect you. Nobody was going to jump in and say, ‘Okay, you guys, break it up.’ Consequently, you were ready to fight at the drop of a hat. You’re tough, you told yourself—you’re a killer.

  “Anyway, there was this one guy named Skip, and he was in the same cottage as your brother. I can’t remember Skip’s last name, but he had murdered both of his parents—it was a notorious case in Oregon at the time. He was a twelve-year-old boy, and his parents were a couple of drunks who used to beat him regularly. One night they beat the hell out of him and then they passed out in bed. The only thing Skip loved in the world was his puppy dog. That night Skip killed his parents and his dog. The police found him lying alongside the puppy crying, and the court put him up at MacLaren’s. Skip was dangerous; he really should have been in the insane asylum.”

  One day, according to Duane, Skip and Gary found themselves working together in the cottage’s food preparation area. “Whatever cottage Skip was in,” Duane said, “the number one rule was to keep him away from knives because he was psycho. If he got a knife, chances are he’s going to use it. This one morning Skip and Gary got into an argument and Skip got hold of a knife. Gary went straight up against Skip and got the knife away from him, and then Gary beat the shit out of him. Gary left Skip on the floor, crying. After that, Gary was seen as nobody to fuck with. He got to be regarded as one of the tougher guys at MacLaren’s, and his closest buddies were not very nice guys. I would not have dreamed of trying to start a fight with Gary or push him around. First off, we got along fine—it never would have happened anyway. But I guarantee you that I would not want to have gone down with him, because he was tough. If you messed with him, he would be looking for revenge.”

  Duane told me another tale about Gary’s time in L.E.D.

  “There was a kid at MacLaren’s named Fritz, and he was a real sociopath sadist. He’d been sent there when he was about eleven. He used to catch cats, bind their tails together with a rawhide thong, and then throw them over a clothesline tied together and watch them fight to get free. Of course, the cats would kill each other. That’s what he was up there for, animal cruelty. He was a monster, especially for his age. At MacLaren’s, Fritz used to like to sharpen pencils and get them to that point where they were just like a needle and then stick them into people.

  “One night,” Duane continued, “I’m in the bridal suite, which was the nickname for unit number one in segregation, right alongside L.E.D. There were no toilet facilities or anything—you’d just sit on the floor and that’s all there was to do. I’m sitting in there late at night and I hear voices coming from the shower area. I recognize one of the voices immediately. It’s Fritz. He’s being held down and he’s begging for mercy. And then I heard the voices of the boys who were holding him down. It was Gary, with a couple of his friends. Do you know what they did to Fritz? They took pencils and shoved them up his ass. I could hear them talking about it as they were doing it. I never forgot this kid screaming, and hearing Gary say, ‘Don’t move, you’ll break the fucking pencil, you son of a bitch.’ And then I’d hear them laughing, and I could hear Fritz screaming. I don’t know what Fritz did to deserve that. He was clearly nobody’s sweetheart, but you can imagine what a pencil could do if it broke off in your rectum. It could be fatal. That’s the kind of thing that went on in L.E.D., the ugly side of it.

  “After that, Gary’s reputation—at least among the kids—got worse. He became seen as somebody who was frightening, and other boys kept their distance.”

  IN CONTRAST TO THESE HORROR TALES, the following story is almost tender, though in its own way it is also worse.

  I remember once finding a letter that Gary had written my mother, that she kept hidden in the back of her desk. The letter had been written several years after his time at MacLaren’s—probably when Gary was about twenty, and was serving a sentence in the Portland City Jail, on one charge or another. Gary wrote it from a hospital, shortly after he first started making suicide attempts in jail. He would break the lightbulbs in his cell then slash his wrists. When the bleeding got bad enough, he would kick his sleeping cell mate in the head. The poor guy would wake up to find Gary’s hand spurting blood in his face, and then he’d yell for a guard to come and save my brother’s life. It got to be something of a regular routine, and my mother had written Gary, asking him why he seemed bent on playing such a deadly game.

  Gary wrote back that he had been haunted by something that had happened years before at MacLaren’s—an incident that he had never told anybody about. Gary wrote that he had befriended a young boy, about fourteen, who had a pretty and a fragile manner—a bad combination inside a jail. The boy was sent to MacLaren’s because his foster parents could no longer handle him, and he had no living relatives who would claim him. In other words, he was alone—an orphan. No family, no visitors, no friends. He was one of those kids, Gary wrote, that both the counselors and the inmates felt they could treat any way they wanted, because nobody would speak for him. Gary said he watched one time while ten other boys held the kid down and took turns raping him. Gary said that when his turn came, he refused to take it, and that his refusal seemed to win the boy’s trust.

  The longer the mistreatment of the boy went on, the more fragile he became. One day the boy got sick. The supervisors took him to the infirmary a few times, but he never seemed to get better. Finally they decided he was faking his illness, in order to pull off an escape. Gary was bunking with the boy at this time, he told my mother, and he thought of him as somebody innocent who deserved love and protection. One cold night, the boy had called to a night watchman and asked to be taken to the infirmary, but the guard refused. The boy made his way into Gary’s bunk and asked my brother: “Can I stay here with you tonight? I’m scared and I need somebody to hold me.” Gary lay in bed with the boy most of the night, holding him, running his hand over the boy’s fevered brow, talking gently to him. “I just want to disappear,” the boy told Gary, and then he tried to curl up into a ball in my brother’s arms. “I want to disappear into the nothingness inside myself, where nobody can hurt me ever again.” Finally, the boy fell asleep, and so did Gary, holding him. When Gary awoke, he was still holding the boy, who was now curled up into himself, cold and dead. Gary said he stayed there and kept holding the boy, caressing his face. “This is what will happen to me if somebody doesn’t get me out of jail,” Gary wrote. “I’m too healthy to d
ie the way that boy died, so I tried to escape the only way I knew how. I’m sorry, Mom.”

  This story is, I believe, another one of those necessary lies that the members of my family learned to tell about themselves in order to tell far worse truths. MacLaren’s has no record of any such death from around that time, and there’s no reference to anything remotely similar in Gary’s files. I don’t believe the incident happened in any literal sense, though in a figurative and perhaps more important sense, the story is almost certainly true. I think the boy Gary was writing about—the boy who tried to disappear into the nothingness within himself—was Gary. I think Gary was writing about his last night on earth, before he became as cruel as he needed to be to survive the rest of his life.

  THEN, SOMETHING SEEMED to change in Gary. His cottage and school reports improved steadily, and he seemed more receptive to counseling efforts. In June 1956, Gary’s therapist wrote: “Counselor has seen Gary regularly and he has used the time well to discuss his problems in relationship to his own feelings of fear and anger. He expresses a great deal of fear about any personal relationships and seems to be afraid both of what he might do and is afraid of what might be done to him. He still seems to have a compulsive personality makeup in that he feels compelled to behave as he does. He has expressed a feeling of rejection from the family, particularly the father, has been hurt by the father both physically and mentally. Gary has talked of his early life of moving around and has reported a great number of fights and aggressive activity.”

  In general, the school’s officials felt Gary had turned an important corner, and that it was now time for him to apply his new perspective to the real-life demands of living and working with society and his family. In the summer, Gary’s counselor initiated a parole program which Gary helped shape. He would return to live at our home, and he would enroll as a sophomore at Portland’s Franklin High School. He would also agree to seek part-time work, to avoid contact with anybody with a delinquent record, and to refrain from any illegal activities. In addition, Gary agreed to see a therapist on a weekly basis at the University of Portland Psychological Service Clinic. “Gary appeared to be very anxious to continue such a plan,” Gary’s counselor wrote, “and he expressed an interest in paying for the services himself, as he did not want to burden his father with any more expenses. It was felt he would continue with his therapy … and benefit greatly thereby.”

  On September 1, Gary was paroled from MacLaren’s Reform School for Boys and returned to our home.

  “I never saw Gary again after that,” Duane said. “I got paroled myself and went into the service. A short time later, I got my girlfriend pregnant and I decided I had to tell all my old friends good-bye. I knew if I continued to hang around them, the marriage had no chance. I grew up real fast at that point. I would read in the paper about a lot of the guys I knew up there. A lot of them went on to prison for one reason or another, and a lot of them died hard deaths. Then, bang, one day there’s poor Gary on the front page, asking Utah to kill him. I was living in California, working in the Bay area representing a paper mill, on the morning that they executed him. I just didn’t think that they would ever do it, that somehow or another somebody would intercede. What Gary did was wrong, there’s no question about it, but my God, we keep Mansonites alive, and that type. There are so many that are worse that had nowhere near the redeeming value that Gary had, the potential.

  “I wished many times, when I was watching Gary in the news, going through his pathetic Don Quixote routine, that I could just go up there and put my arm around him and say, ‘Goddamnit, Gary, cool it—quit humiliating these sons of bitches, they’ll kill you if you don’t. For once in your life bow to it. If you just give them what they want, tell them you’re sorry and beg for forgiveness, you’ll live.’ I am firmly convinced that if Gary had admitted he was up against a higher power that he could not beat, they would have found it in their hearts to spare him somehow. He just challenged the wrong people. I remember telling my wife, ‘Those goddamn Mormons have God on their side and they don’t question their right to carry out God’s edicts as they see it.’ That kind of religious fervor is scary.”

  Before he left my place that day, Duane had a final thought he wanted to share. “It must be painful for you to hear some of these things. It sure would be for me if my brother had gone through something like this. Gary was one of the guys. He is an old friend to me in my heart and I’m loyal to my old friends. He wasn’t a simple, mindless monster, in the way that the newspapers often portray somebody who has committed a violent act. He was a good guy that got fucked over. A lot of it, I admit, he did himself. But not all of it. Not all of it by a long shot.”

  IN GARY’S ABSENCE, the family seemed to enjoy an unusual period of quiet. My father’s publishing business was now thriving, and he had expanded it to include a yearly summary of traffic laws in the states of Oregon and Washington. He was now making enough money to run offices in Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma, and he stayed on the road much of the time, supervising the itinerant men he had hired to work as his salesmen. My brother Frank, now a seventeen-year-old junior at Franklin High School, had developed a strong interest in the craft and vocation of magic. His passion had been inspired, in part, by the ongoing family legend that Houdini was our grandfather, but no matter: Frank had a flair all his own. Meantime, Gaylen—now a ten-year-old, in parochial school—seemed to have the makings of a child prodigy. He had already read much of Shakespeare and he could quote Poe’s gloomiest verses at length. He appeared to love poetry more than anything, except for girls, whom he loved even as a child. In the end, he would die in the middle of an unfinished poem, and in the midst of a love affair that had already effectively cost him his life years before.

  Only my mother was counting the days until Gary’s release. The more she had watched my father beat him and treat him as if he weren’t his own son, and the more Gary was punished by school and law officials, the more my mother came to feel that Gary was her special son, the one she had to love the most. It wasn’t merely that he was now living the role that she had once held in her own family, as the black sheep. There was something more to it. Like my father, Bessie Gilmore had her dark secrets, and she watched over them with a vigilance all her own.

  WHEN GARY CAME HOME, the peace broke. He hadn’t been back a few days before he and my father were engaged in war again, day and night. Every time Gary violated some house rule or showed any insolence, my father threatened him with a swift return to MacLaren’s, and once or twice called in the parole officer to enforce the threat. “It appears that these two people, Gary and his father, can not establish a working basis…” the officer wrote after one of these visits. “[The] two personalities are so suspicious of each other, that a good healthy father and son relationship appears to be beyond their reach. Both the boy and his father wish to be friends, but apparently both have decided that a good offense is the best defense so there is apparently little give and take. It is not an impossible situation, however, and perhaps with Gary seeing [a psychiatrist] regularly, we may bring about an understanding between these two quite hostile people.”

  Unfortunately, after one of the many quarrels, my father refused to pay for any more of Gary’s psychological counseling. He couldn’t see where it was benefiting anybody. After that, Gary’s parole officer effectively threw his hands in the air. “Mr. Gilmore appears to be incapable of establishing even a marginal constructive emotional relationship with Gary …” he wrote. “The only hope is that Gary can acquire the necessary maturity through his school relationships that will enable him to continue on parole in spite of these negative factors existing at home. However, the writer realizes this is wishful thinking in a sense, due to Gary’s ambivalence in regard to academic school.”

  The renewed enmity had a way of spilling over to the whole house hold. One time, my mother found Gaylen sitting on the back steps, screaming and crying. Gary had just had a row with my father and had stomped out the back. Gayl
en was sitting on the back steps and was in Gary’s way. Gary picked him up and threw him off the back porch. The brother that just a year or so before Gary had still played with was now fair game for his rage. “He’s changed, Mother,” Gaylen said, sobbing. “He doesn’t like us anymore.”

  “Yes,” my mother said, holding Gaylen, “I know, he’s different now. But sometimes it is too late to change people. Sometimes, you just have to love them anyway.”

  It was about this time that the dinnertime fights at our house became fierce and constant. Dinner had never been the easiest hour in our home—in large part because it was the only hour of the day when the whole family was certain to come together. Indeed, to miss dinner, or even to show up late for it, was to violate one of my father’s most inviolable rules. But after his return from MacLaren’s, Gary began missing the dinner hour more and more, lingering after school with his friends, or coming in after dark and making his own meal from what was left over. This offense was enough to result in horrible fights between him and my father, or to induce my father to banish him from any meals in the house until he learned to live by the rules.

  My brother Frank remembered these dinnertime bouts vividly. The kitchen was a smallish room at the rear of the house. That’s where we dined. My mother sat at one end of the table and Gaylen sat at the other. Frank and Gary were seated on one side, and my father kept me next to him on the other side. “We’d sit down at that table,” Frank said, “and we’d have fantastic food. Breaded veal cutlets stacked up, baked or boiled potatoes, all kinds of vegetables, dessert, and whatever you wanted to drink. Sometimes fresh homemade bread. I mean, you’re talking eating like a king. Yet there would be no way you could enjoy that meal. We would be sitting down, just starting to eat, and invariably Mom would say something like, ‘Well, I wonder where Gary’s at.’ And that would set Dad off. He’d say, ‘I don’t care where he’s at, I’m glad he’s not here.’ Or Gary would come in, and Dad would say, ‘What the hell are you doing here? We’re not running a cafe. Get out.’ Then Mom would come to Gary’s defense and say, ‘Well, I fix these meals and he’s welcome to eat. I have some say in this.’