Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  The next morning I would be in church along with everybody else, worrying about salvation.

  THIS COULD GO ON ONLY SO LONG. It went on until the summer of 1967—the summer that became known in pop history as the Summer of Love. Hippiedom and psychedelia were in full bloom. The Beatles had gone from their pop-informed style of rock & roll to the avant-garde-inspired terrain of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Young people were growing their hair long, dressing fancifully, trying to break themselves off from the conventions of their parents and the surrounding culture and make their own rules. It would all get ruined soon enough— we would pay some hard prices for our generational revolt—but for that one season, it was a wonderful time to be alive. Everything around us— the music, the politics, the nation’s emotional stakes—made plain that we were entering a different age, that young people were free to redefine themselves in completely new terms. Everything was worth risking—or at least we thought so at the time.

  I spent afternoons during that summer hanging out at Portland’s Psychedelic Shop and Lair Hill park—places where the longhairs and bikers congregated. In the evenings, I and my friends would go around the corner from the Psychedelic Shop to the Crystal Ballroom, an old upstairs dance hall that had been a popular place for big bands during the Swing Era. The Crystal’s main dance floor was built over ball bearings, and during that summer, when bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service played there, the hippies would dance and skip in circles on the floor, making the whole room bounce and shimmy, like the deck of a drunken ship.

  I met a young blond woman named Pamela at one of these shows. Every day for weeks afterward, Pamela and I would meet at the Psychedelic Shop and sit on the floor, talking, holding hands, kissing. Sometimes, after midnight, when our parents were asleep, we would have long, feverish phone conversations, talking about how much we loved each other, and whether we should have sex. We finally decided we should.

  One day in late August we met at the Psychedelic Shop. Peter, Paul and Mary had released a new album, Album 1700, and we pooled our money and bought it. We took a bus to my home on Oatfield. My mother and Frank were both at work. Pamela and I made a quick bed on the floor of my mother’s old bedroom, and we put our new record on my portable stereo. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was just starting to play when Pamela laid down, opened her legs, and guided me inside her. When I climaxed, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” was still playing. I was lying on top of Pamela, looking at her wide-open, pale blue eyes, stunned by the immense pleasure of still feeling myself inside her, when I heard the downstairs front door close. Somebody—my mother or Frank—was home early from work. Pamela got up hurriedly, grabbed her clothes, and hid in my mother’s closet. I got dressed and went downstairs, my heart pounding wildly. It was Frank, home early. Thank God.

  I didn’t tell him I had a naked young woman in the closet upstairs, though I suppose I could have. Instead, through a convoluted set of movements, I managed to sneak Pamela out of the house without Frank ever knowing she was there, and then I met her later at Lair Hill Park.

  I felt some guilt about the sex—after all, I had just committed a sin next to murder. It wasn’t small guilt, but it also wasn’t enough to prevent me from repeating the sin. One day, Pamela’s father figured out what his daughter and I were doing, and he confronted us as we were walking into Lair Hill Park, holding hands. He took Pamela by the arm and led her away, telling me I would never get to see her again. He answered the phone every time I called after that, and he always hung up on me. Pamela never called me back, and I never saw her again.

  A LOT OF PEOPLE I KNEW WERE STARTING TO SMOKE MARIJUANA and take psychedelics. I thought about this particular temptation longer and harder than I had thought about having sex, but not that much longer. The first time I smoked enough marijuana to get high I was with two young men who, like myself, were members of the Mormon priesthood. We stayed up all night, talking about rock and & roll and girls and God.

  A month or so later, it was Christmas. I and the same two Mormon boys decided we wanted some new records, but we didn’t have the money to buy them. We came up with an elaborate, foolproof scheme about how we could shoplift the albums from a big department store in downtown Portland without getting caught. We got caught immediately and were taken to a hidden office on the store’s top floor, where we were surrounded by numerous store detectives. They drove us over to the Portland Police Station—the same place where Gary and Gaylen had been held many times before. For some reason, the police detective at the station thought the store should not file charges. “I don’t want to see these boys spending Christmas in jail,” he said. The head store detective agreed, as long as we would promise never to come back. We promised. As we were leaving, the police detective took me aside. “You have an older brother named Gary, don’t you?” he asked. “Don’t you think it’s hard enough on your mother, having one son in jail? Don’t go the way of your brother. If you do, you’re only throwing your life away.”

  I THOUGHT ABOUT THE POLICEMAN’S WARNING A LOT. At times I had feared that crime might be a familial disease: Would I wake up one day and want to rob? Was it inevitable that I would make the same choices as Gaylen and Gary—that I would end up hurting people or plundering their lives and possessions? Was I bound to end up on the inside of a jail cell, thinking about the world outside?

  In truth, I not only didn’t have much talent for crime (though, come to think of it, neither did my brothers), I also didn’t have much appetite for it. For one thing, I had seen up close what my brothers’ lives had brought them. In addition, I had my mother’s urgings to consider: For years, she had told me repeatedly that I was the family’s last hope for redemption. “I want one son to turn out right, one son I don’t have to end up visiting in jail, one son I don’t have to watch in court as his life is sentenced away, piece by piece,” she said. After the policeman’s warning, her words reverberated even more in my head.

  As a result, I felt I now had the job of signifying all the goodness that would make up for all my brothers’ failures and misdeeds. I was not allowed, it seemed, to enact my own darkness, my own violence, my own hatred. All such license had been taken up by my brothers, with disastrous results. The only role left in the script for me was to atone for their losses, to set the historical balance right.

  Still, I was doing my best to be bad—at least within certain limitations. I was now smoking dope regularly, and I had just started taking psychedelics on weekends. I was also skipping school much of the time— writing my own excuse slips and forging my mother’s signature, so I could take the afternoon off and go meet girlfriends at various places, for the purposes of getting stoned and having sex. I told myself I had to become familiar with sin and rebellion—that there were truths within those realms of experience that I had to learn about. They felt like natural truths—like something I had been gravitating toward my whole life.

  My drift was not going unnoticed by people at the church. One Sun day, a member of the local bishopric—a man I admired much and had once regarded as something of a father figure—drove over to our house on Oatfield Road and asked me to step outside for a talk. He told me that he and other church leaders had grown concerned about my changing appearance—the new length of my hair and my style of dressing—and they were also bothered by some of the political views they had heard me voice. They found all these changes on my part an unwelcome influence on other young Mormons. Unless I was willing to forswear this new spirit of rebellion, he said, then perhaps I should think about no longer attending the church.

  On that day. I realized a line had been drawn in my life, and I knew which side of that line I had to stand on. These new things that had become my passions—rock & roll, politics, art, literature, and sex—had provided me with a new creed and a new sense of courage. Looking back, I now believe that these choices allowed me—and many others in my generation—to act out a kind of formalized, largely permitted brand of “criminality”: W
e could use drugs or defy authority or flout the law or even contemplate violent or destructive acts of revolt, we told ourselves, because we had a reason to. Also, through the bravest music of the era, we could believe we were taking part in a form of rebellion that truly mattered—or at least, I told myself, that counted for more than my brothers’ brand of rebellion. And in the darkest music of the time—the music of the Rolling Stones or Doors or Velvet Underground—I could participate in darkness without submitting to it, which is something Gary and Gaylen had been unable to do.

  LIKE MOST EVERYONE ELSE IN MY FAMILY, I had now adopted some executed men as personal heroes. My picks were Boston’s Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and Salt Lake’s Joe Hill. All these men were executed—at least officially—for the crime of murder. But they were also killed because they had challenged the nation’s conventions of power and authority.

  Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrants who were also anarchists, and who advocated the overthrow of the U.S. Government. The Boston Police hated them, and in 1920, they charged the two with a pair of robbery-murders. The trial was blatantly partisan, and numerous authors, poets, and journalists around the world protested the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was to no avail. On August 22,1927, Massachusetts electrocuted the two men, despite substantial doubts about their guilt— doubts that have only grown over the decades.

  Joe Hill was an American songwriter and poet. In 1913—the year my mother was born—Hill moved to Salt Lake from Los Angeles, where he worked with the radical and controversial Industrial Workers of the World to organize the state’s laborers. Utahans did not care for the union movement, and they treated its advocates roughly. The unionists struck back—sometimes violently. In early 1914, Joe Hill was arrested for the murder of a storekeeper and his son. The storekeeper, John Morrison, was a former policeman who had been a strikebreaker, and who had reportedly killed several members of the IWW in gun battles. Hill was convicted, and despite pleas from numerous prominent Americans— including President Woodrow Wilson—Utah was determined to put the poet to death. It would be the most famous execution in Utah’s history until that of my brother, sixty-two years later. Like my brother, Hill chose a firing squad as the mode of his execution, saying: “I’ll take shooting. I’m used to that. I have been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it again.” When the time for his death came, Hill himself gave the riflemen the command to fire.

  Learning the stories of these men forever changed something in me. It made me hate the people and the structures that used their power to keep others under their control. It also made me understand that any state that had the power and the will to put a man to death was indeed a malevolent place.

  But my radicalized sympathy for the downtrodden only went so far. I may have been reading Frantz Fanon, Upton Sinclair, and Eldridge Cleaver and writing school papers about the Miranda ruling, but I almost never bothered to visit my brother Gary, who had now been in prison for five years. This is not an easy admission to make. It is, in fact, probably the one misdeed in my life that I feel the most regret and guilt over. It didn’t help matters that in Oregon at that time inmates weren’t allowed visitors under age eighteen. Gary and I exchanged a few letters over the years, but I always felt a bit bad writing him about what I was doing in school or about friends and pastimes, because to Gary those were things and events that existed on the “outside.” Later, during our few visits, we both struggled to find some common base. But I was young and outside; he was growing old, inside. And the distance hurt.

  I had no idea what his life was like. Also, the few things I heard didn’t make me want to know more. In the fall of 1968, there had been a serious riot at Oregon State Penitentiary, and Gary had taken part in it. I heard a story about how he had taken a ball peen hammer and thrown it at the head of an old enemy in the prison yard, and then beat the fallen man in the head with it. The man went on to live the rest of his life as a vegetable. I also heard that Gary had stabbed a black man many times because the man had in some way hurt or threatened a friend of Gary’s.

  I must have realized, on some level, that Gary was living in a world of horror, but I never admitted it to myself. I simply wasn’t there for my brother during this time. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was too busy planning my own escape.

  DURING MY LAST YEAR IN HIGH SCHOOL, I BECAME GOOD friends with my Creative Writing teacher, a woman named Grace McGinnis. Grace had befriended me and had become my champion—and in the obtuse political climate that prevailed at Milwaukie High School in the late 1960s, this wasn’t exactly a riskless effort. Milwaukie was a conservative town—in 1968, we had seen a lot of GEORGE WALLACE FOR PRESIDENT bumper stickers around our parts—and as youth culture grew more radical and daring, and more outlandish, the community and the school reacted with anger and fear. The school passed dress codes— dictating how long we could wear our hair, and prohibiting short skirts and flamboyant dress of any sort—and I and a handful of other students defied these regulations. As our punishment, the school’s officials decided we could not take part in extracurricular activities, like sports or drama or band. I was a member of a high school discussion group that debated national and international affairs on local television, and Milwaukie’s vice-principal thought I should quit the team unless I cut my hair. Otherwise, I was dishonoring the school and our town with such an unsavory appearance. Grace went to bat for me with the faculty. She made an impassioned speech to them about what she saw as their bigotry, and she lashed out at those teachers who called the longhaired students sissies and who basically treated us as the enemy. As a result of Grace’s efforts, I was able to continue with the debate group.

  I later learned that Grace’s interest in me had in part been stirred by something we shared in common: her maiden name had been Gilmore— her father, in fact, had been a man named Frank Gilmore. As far as I can tell, we were never really any relation, but we used to make a lot of jokes about somehow sharing the same father.

  In the winter of my senior year, my mother’s financial condition became precarious. She had been keeping up the house’s mortgage payments, but she had been unable to keep the property taxes current, and the state was making noises about seizing the property. The total debt came to around $1200, which seemed like a fortune in those days. Frank—who still lived with us—renewed his campaign for the family to move into a smaller place, and my mother resumed her resistance. We sold the piano and much of the fine furniture, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to take a job so that I could help, but my mother refused. She thought it was important that I should keep investing my time and efforts in my education; she had dreams that I might win a scholarship to college, since she could not afford to send me. She had never had a son who completed high school and went on to college, and she wanted me to be that son.

  After school one day, I visited Grace in her classroom to talk about my mother’s dilemma. Grace was a compassionate and smart person, and I wanted her advice. She asked if she could come over to the house and talk with my mother, so she could make a better assessment of the situation. My mother was reluctant to have visitors, but I talked her into a meeting. Grace and my mother talked for hours and they became good friends. Grace started coming over regularly, and also visited my mother at the restaurant where she worked.

  In addition to everything else, Grace was an adept psychic—probably more the real article than Fay ever was. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” she told me one day, “but I get a bad feeling when I am in your house. I think the place may be haunted, and I’m not sure anything good can come for your mother and your family while she continues to live there.” I appreciated Grace’s concern, but I told her she wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know. I even knew something more. It didn’t matter where we lived. We would be cursed wherever we went.

  It wasn’t long before Grace was driving my mother down to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, so she could visit Gary on Sundays. A short time later, G
race started sitting in on my mother’s visits with Gary. Grace and my brother got into long and lively conversations about literature and art, and she was struck by his fine mind and his impressive vocabulary. She liked him very much.

  I was invited to join these trips, but I always declined. I told Grace I had seen enough of the insides of jails and courthouses by the age of twelve to last me a lifetime.

  MY MOTHER FINALLY DECIDED SHE SHOULD GO TO THE MORMON church and ask them for help with her problem. She said that if the church would help her with the property taxes, she would deed the place over to them upon her death. But the church was reluctant to take this offer. After all, she had two sons who had repeatedly got themselves in trouble and had been no help to her. Plus, she had a son who had been imprisoned for his refusal to serve in the army. Such a defiance of convention was unimaginable to the church leaders. And then there was me: The church had once taken me in, befriended me, given me the priesthood, and in turn I had become a rebel who, as far as they could see, now believed in ungodly values and was living a less than exemplary life.

  The local bishop decided against giving my mother the help she requested. “It wasn’t wise for her to keep the house,” he later told Larry Schiller. “It was too large, she only lived in a room or two, and she couldn’t maintain it. She wanted to keep it because it reminded her of happier years, but it didn’t seem sensible. It seemed wiser to get her into a small apartment. But she refused that idea. I think it was an emotional thing with her. She didn’t like people telling her what to do, plus, she had an emotional tie to that house.”