Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  When we would arrive in the town where we were going to stay, my father would rent an apartment or small house. These accommodations were always in an aging, somewhat forlorn part of town. In Seattle, we lived in neighborhoods like Queen Anne Hill and Ravenna. Today, Queen Anne has been refurbished and looks like it could have been transplanted from San Francisco’s Nob Hill. In the 1950s, though, it was a tired part of town—a bargain district for affordable housing—and parts of it were creeping up on dilapidation. We usually rented rooms or suites in old post-Victorian-era houses that were clearly on their last legs. Sometimes we were the only tenants who would occupy rooms in these places. To me, they resembled the moody, ramshackle, haunted houses you saw in a black-and-white ghost thriller, and maybe that’s how I got my abiding attachment to horror stories.

  I suppose these places we rented reminded my father of the older world he had grown up in, or maybe the disappearing world where he had hidden for so long and where he still found a certain comfort. These were the years before fast-moving urban renewal projects had razed cities of many of their antiquated structures of desolation and replaced them with cleaner, ready-made structures of desolation. There were people living in these old houses who had grown up and lived in such rooms and buildings their whole lives, and they wanted to die in those rooms before the world built its new rooms. I can’t say for sure that my father was somebody enamored of an old world—actually, he was somebody who always loved buying the newest camera and recording technology and who was excited when Americans began to explore space—but there was a certain milieu that was his realm, that he felt fully confident within, and nothing could budge him from it.

  I remember one place in particular where we lived in Seattle. It was set back off the sidewalk about two hundred feet—a dark old house poised on top of a large, trestle-style wooden framework. To get from the sidewalk to the front door, you had to cross a half-rotten wooden bridge that had a few planks missing. Beneath the bridge was nothing but a jungle of briers and weeds, so overgrown and vast that you couldn’t see down to the ground where the tangle began. There were steps off the side of the building going down into that snarl, but nobody in their right mind would have walked those stairs. According to my father, in the early twentieth century there had been a massive fire that had half-leveled many of Seattle’s homes. When the area was rebuilt, he said, a false ground was raised over several of the collapsed homes. In other words, there was a dead city buried under the part of town we lived in. Some people even thought that some of the old houses still stood under the ground, or at least, the husks that were left of their burned remains still survived there. Down in that web of thorns and bushes beneath our house, my father told me, were the remnants of another house. Sometimes I’d stand on the bridge and look down into that moat of undergrowth, and I’d imagine the skeleton of the other house down there. I would wonder if it was still full of the skeletons of the people who had once lived in it. Every time I saw a rustle in that underbrush, it gave me a chill. I didn’t dream well in that house, but that was nothing new.

  JUST AS MY FATHER LIKED old houses, when he went out on a shopping spree he preferred to make the rounds of secondhand and rummage outlets, like the Salvation Army, Goodwill, or St. Vincent de Paul stores, or Seattle’s Farmers’ Market complex (these days a refurbished mall of hip stores and cafes sprawling along the city’s downtown pier, but in the late 1950s a maze of rummages and old bookstores, and coffee shops full of vagrants). These were my father’s favorite places to find old clothes to dress us both in, and to find antediluvian furniture for our antediluvian dwellings.

  Naturally, I accompanied my father on these outings. I was his appointed shadow. He dressed me in fashions that matched his own. He’d slick my hair back with a thick pomade—the same pomade he used on his own thinning gray hair. He’d outfit me in slacks and sport coats and pastel or woolen dress shirts like his own, and then he would put a string tie on me and a fedora on my head. I know we were a striking and strange pair—an old man with a nearly identical little boy. Because of his age, many people assumed that my father was in fact my grandfather. I would reply that, no, he was my father, and people seemed surprised, even disbelieving. I couldn’t understand this, and it bothered me. Later, when I began to make a few friends in grade school and would go over to visit at their homes, it was my turn to be shocked when I saw that they had parents who seemed so unaccountably young—parents who, no doubt, were in their late twenties or mid thirties. I had never been around people of such age or manners. I couldn’t understand them, couldn’t relate to them and, to tell you the truth, couldn’t really relate all that well to their children, who were supposed to be my friends. They seemed like aberrations to me, though of course it was me and my father who were the aberrations. Maybe that’s why I never formed any lasting friendships with other kids until after my father died.

  I was supposed to be in school during these moves, but my father was not overly concerned with such niceties. Sometimes, after we first moved into a new area, he would keep me at home for several weeks before enrolling me in the local school. If it was spring, he’d figure it wasn’t worth enrolling me at all and would keep me home until fall. There were numerous ways in which these prolonged absences from school weren’t all that good for me, but the one area I felt it most immediately in was math studies. In the late 1950s, second or third grade math levels might vary considerably between two school districts, especially school districts in different states. I would move into a school in Seattle, and they would be teaching the basics of division, when I barely knew how to carry my ones when adding multiple numbers. In theory, teachers should be helpful or patient with a confused student, though I don’t remember many who were, or who were inclined to make exceptions. Most just figured I was dumb or lazy about math. Or perhaps they knew that my father was something of a perennial floater, and that made me the roving son of a roving man, which made me hardly worth their trouble. In any event, I never became too adept at math, never developed much affection for its intricacies. Its laws and mysteries intimidated me, and I felt like I must be stupid after all, because I couldn’t figure out the arithmetical rules and regulations that other kids seemed so quick to understand.

  However, when it came to reading, it was a different matter. My father had taught me to read long before the first grade. He would sit me on his knee at his desk, pointing at words in picture books, teaching me to recognize them and how to master the logic of their shapes and the pronunciation of their letters. It’s true, he wouldn’t read to me at night— maybe because he wanted me to read to myself. And read I did. Reading became one of the activities I loved most in life. It was something I could do alone, and of course it was a great method of escaping the reality of the life around me. The first stories I remember falling in love with were EC crime and horror comics, and comic book adventures by Carl Barks—the man who wrote the great 1940s and ’50s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge tales for Walt Disney’s comics. Barks was a smart man— he knew the scope and meanings of the ancient mythological tales inside and out, and he transformed them to the world of talking ducks with a wit and moral integrity that cost the original stories none of their depth or wonder. After Barks, it was an easier step to appreciate not just the adventurism of Jack London, Jules Verne, or Alexander Dumas, but also the full-breadth drama and incredible longing that one found in ancient epics like the Iliad or the Odyssey, or some of the other Roman and Greek legends. A few year later, I would form a deep passion for horror writers, like Poe and Bram Stoker, and the ghost stories of Henry James and Émile Zola and Ambrose Bierce. I didn’t always understand the language of what I read—and I certainly didn’t get some of the more subtle themes of the stories—but the world these people described was a world I felt at home in.

  In the evenings, I would sit on a sofa in the living room, near where my father worked, and I would read my comic books, or the Scribner hardbacks of books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped! or 20,000 Le
agues Under the Sea, with their lusty N. C. Wyeth illustrations. Then my father would turn out his desk lamp and join me on the sofa, and he would turn on the television. He had a regular slew of shows he liked to watch— mostly crime fare, like The Untouchables, Richard Diamond, Highway Patrol, and The Defenders, or Westerns, like Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Maverick, and Have Gun, Will Travel. Unlike my mother, my father would never try to stop me from watching the horror films I loved, and he always seemed to know fascinating anecdotes about Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff that had the effect of humanizing the men behind the monsters. (Which was hardly necessary, since I almost always took the side of the monsters anyway. To me, the human characters were boring and expendable time-wasters; they existed so the misunderstood monsters could kill them and pay back humanity’s unkindnesses.)

  I remember that whenever Les Misérables would come on—the 1935 version, with Fredric March and Charles Laughton—my father would make me sit and watch it with him. “Remember this story,” he told me once, after we had witnessed the merciless police inspector Javert hound Jean Valjean for his petty criminal past. “Remember how the world can persecute a man for his simple mistakes, and remember what a horrible thing a pious judge is.”

  He would put his arm around me and draw me close to him. In those hours, I felt safe against the world, but I knew from my father’s words that there were hard punishments yet to come.

  SOMETIMES WHEN WE WENT out dressed alike, my father would visit what were known as the skid-row parts of town, where transients and heavy drinkers hung out. Today some of these people would be called homeless, but in those days were called bums. In Seattle, which had once been something of a rowdy pioneer and gold rush town, and which still had some fairly hard types working on its docks, the skid-row parts of town were considered rough quarters. My father would visit the area’s missions and its taverns. He would order a short beer and talk to bartenders about their customers. My father knew that broken men could be found in these places, and for one reason or another, these were the men he wanted to have work for him. In part because they would work cheap and were easy to domineer. Also, they probably reminded my father of his own down-and-out times. Often, he would bring these whiskered men to live in the same house with us. He’d buy them clothes—used clothes, of course—and he’d put them to work as telephone salesmen. If they kept their drinking out of our home and never let it affect their work, and if they did not steal from him or become temperamental, he treated them well. But if they abused his trust or became drunk and rowdy, he fired them on the spot. I remember well the two or three times he punched out men who were probably half his age and twice his strength. My father would make a fist and throw it at their stomach. That always disabled them. Then he hit them in the face until they begged him to stop. Then he would throw them and their belongings out the door, give them a few dollars, and warn them: “Never come around us again.”

  In those times, when my father visited the bars or taverns, he expected me to take care of myself. He would give me a few dollars and tell me to find a store to shop in or to go catch the bus and find a movie to see. Looking back, I realize I was allowed an amazing amount of movement for a kid. I was free to ride buses to downtown Seattle or the city zoo by age eight, and I was free to stay out until past the hour of darkness. I don’t remember anybody ever threatening or scaring me during these times, and I don’t remember any adult asking me what I was doing out on my own, without a parent or guardian. When I couldn’t find a good bookstore or movie house, I’d spend hours exploring abandoned old houses in the Queen Anne district. It was rumored that if you dug around in the basements of the older dwellings in the area, you would sometimes find passages into an antique underworld—the world left by the awful fire from generations before. All I ever found, though, were dirty ruins and an occasional discarded keepsake.

  THE TRUTH IS, I WAS a young boy living with an old man in what was left of an old world. We shopped in old stores, we ate in old diners, we dressed in old suits. It’s as if I were a child dressed up for the 1940s, living on the verge of the 1960s.

  All this seemed normal to me—it was the only world I knew. But perhaps on some level I recognized that it wasn’t normal, and maybe this recognition took its toll. Looking back, I now believe I probably experienced some periodic childhood depression—which shouldn’t seem surprising. Once in a while, during these periods of living with my father, I would catch an illness that was like an odd, prolonged spell. These bouts would usually last for a whole day and night, during which I would lie in bed or wrapped up on the sofa, and I’d imagine that other people— usually members of my family—would come in and out of the room and talk to me. For some reason, when I was lying in the darkness, I’d concentrate on my hands. It felt like there was a great weight at the center of my palms and that if I could just close my fist around that feeling—if I could just capture it and hold it—I’d be okay. I’d squeeze hard enough to cut my nails into my palms.

  Once or twice I hallucinated something else: my father sitting on the edge of my bed with a strange woman. He’d pull the top of her dress down until her breasts fell out, and she would look at me and giggle. “Leave the boy alone,” my father said, and I’d fall back into my fitful half sleep. Some might say that what I’ve just described is an example of recovered memory—in other words, that a scene like this may actually have happened, but I probably suppressed conscious memory of it. I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t think for a moment that my father brought other women into the houses where I lived with him, and I have no evidence that he had any affairs during his marriage to my mother. I’m not sure where a child gets a vision like the one I had. Maybe from a part of my unconscious that I somehow shared with my father, or maybe from some presentiment of my own future erotic fever.

  Still, my fever dream reminds me of something I saw a few years later, when I was poking through my father’s desk drawers. It was a photograph of a nude man standing by a swimming pool, between two nude, large-breasted women. With each hand, he is reaching out and petting the women’s pubic bushes. Meantime, the woman on his left has her hand wrapped around his erect penis, while the other, smiling widely, has reached over and is cupping his balls. I remember it vividly for two reasons: One, it was the first explicitly sexual picture I’d ever seen, so of course it inflamed my mind. The other reason: I am fairly certain that the man in the picture was a younger version of my father. Either that, or perhaps he was one of my father’s other sons—somebody who carried the stamp of Frank Gilmore’s face—but then, that would be a bit too weird, wouldn’t it? All I know is that later, when my father died and we were dividing up his stuff, I went into his desk to find that photo. It was gone, and I never saw or heard anything about it again.

  ONE YEAR, WHEN IT WAS clear that my father and I would be spending much of the Christmas season in Seattle, my mother boxed up some of our old, no-longer-used holiday decorations for me. These ornaments were as old as everything else in our life—a chipped Santa Claus figurine, an incomplete Nativity set (missing the head of the baby Jesus), and a plastic chime box in the shape of a cathedral. When you wound a key on the back of the box, a hymn would play and the painted plastic golden doors would slowly crank open, revealing a backlit Renaissance painting of the Ascension. (I realize now it was actually an Easter relic, though that wouldn’t have made much difference to my childhood comprehension of the holiday’s religious importance.)

  When Christmas came around that year, I fell sick again with one of my spells, and my father and I were unable to make the drive to Portland to spend the holiday with the family. My mother was bitterly disappointed, and she accused my father of lying to her, or me of faking the sickness so that we could spend the holiday alone. I spent that actual Christmas day in bed with the plastic cathedral next to me, endlessly winding its key and watching its doors open to the painting of the flock of angels surrounding the rising Lord, while my father sat in the apartment’s front room, arguing heated
ly on the phone for hours with my mother. The longer I stared at the old Christmas decorations and at the old walls of the apartment and its old doorframes, the sicker and more depressed I became. I felt like I wanted those angels to take me away from all this, into their bright, promising realm of love. I prayed for them to let me die and to lift me into heaven. Of course, they didn’t.

  By the middle of the night, still in a delirium, I’d come to curse the angels and the damn chime box. I threw it against the wall, breaking its cheap doors. I hated the angels, I told myself, because they wouldn’t let me die.

  A day or two later I was better, and my father drove us under the winter sky back to our home in Portland. We sang our silly songs in our awful voices the whole way, right until we turned into the driveway.

  DESPITE HIS VIOLENCE, my father was not much of a fan of guns. My brothers were allowed BB or pellet rifles, but the rules on how they handled these weapons were strict. Handguns were out of the question— though I now recall that after my father died and we were sorting through his possessions, we came across what I believe was a Luger, in a shoulder holster. Some of us thought we should keep the gun, along with his rare East Indian jade and ruby rings, but my mother said no. There were bad memories tied to these things, she claimed, and she would not let anybody in the family keep them. She had a friend of hers take the gun and sell it at a pawnshop.