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Shot in the Heart

Page 43

by Mikal Gilmore


  She handed the phone to me. Gary told me he had talked with his biggest hero, Johnny Cash, earlier that evening. I asked him what Cash had said. “When I picked up the phone I said, ‘Is this the real Johnny Cash?’ And he said: ‘Yes it is.’ And I said: ‘Well, this is the real Gary Gilmore.’”

  Gary told me he had to get off the phone. “I’ll miss you, Gary,” I said. “We’re all proud of you.”

  “Don’t be proud of me,” he said. “What’s there to be proud of? I’m just going to be shot to death, for something that should never have happened.”

  Those were our last words.

  ON MONDAY MORNING, JANUARY 17, in a cannery warehouse out behind Utah State Prison, Gary met his firing squad. I was with my mother and brother and girlfriend when it happened. Just moments before, we had seen the morning newspaper with the headline EXECUTION STAYED, and turned on the television for more news. Good Morning America was on, and there was a press conference: They were announcing that Gary was dead.

  There was no way to be braced for that last seesawing of emotion. One moment you’re forcing yourself to live through the hell of knowing that somebody you love is going to die in a known way, at a specific time and place, and that not only is there nothing you can do to change that, but that for the rest of your life, you will have to move around in a world that wanted this death to happen. You will have to walk past people every day who were heartened by the killing of somebody in your family-somebody who had long ago been himself murdered emotionally. You will have to live in this world and either hate it or make peace with it, because it is the only world you will have available to live in. It is the only world that is.

  The next moment, you see a headline that holds the possibility of a reprieve. Maybe, you think, the courts are seizing control of this matter, wresting it from the momentum of this crazy, eerie inevitability. Maybe they will not allow the death penalty to be applied here so hurriedly—and maybe that will be enough to break the back of this horror, to diffuse all this madness. Maybe it would prove a reprieve not just for Gary and his indomitable will to die, but also a reprieve for what was left of this family. Maybe now we would not have to live in a world that had killed one of us without any misgiving.

  And then, as soon as you’ve allowed yourself that impossible hope, you turn on the television, and there is Larry Schiller—the only journalist who was allowed to witness the shooting—and he is telling you how the warden put a black hood over Gary’s head and pinned a small, circular cloth target above his chest, and then how five men pumped a volley of bullets into that target. He is telling you how the blood flowed from Gary’s devastated heart and down his chest, down his legs, staining his white pants scarlet and dripping to the warehouse floor. He is telling you how Gary’s arm rose slowly at the moment of the impact, how his fingers seemed to wave, to send a sign of departure as his life left him, as if he were finally trying to bid a gentle good-bye to a hard life.

  One moment, hope has come from nowhere. The next moment, you learn that the horror has already happened—and you know you will always have to live with the details of that horror. You will have to try to find a way to live with the sorrow that will now always be at the heart of your heart. You will have to try to find a way to live in this world, in this life, and not hate it—and you will have to try despite the impossibility of such a task.

  I thought all this, and then I looked over at my mother, and I saw her face crack, and I heard her wail: “My God, Gary, where are you? Where have you gone to?”

  FOLLOWING MY BROTHER’S EXECUTION, an outcry arose in Utah against what many people (including several death penalty advocates) saw as the unnecessarily bloody and “old West” aspect of Utah’s mode of capital punishment. Why hold on to such gruesome conventions, the reformists argued, when an increasing number of other states were opting for the comparatively “humane” method of putting the condemned to death by lethal injection? In a fairly brilliant act of legal and moral sleight-of-hand, the Utah legislature managed to accommodate both the traditions of their region and the reformists’ pressure for change. As of 1980, hanging—an old West practice if ever there was one—would no longer be an option for execution (nobody ever chose it anyway), and in its place, Utah now offered the alternative of lethal injection. However, under what was rumored to be a tremendous amount of back-room ecclesiastical pressure, the state also retained the firing squad option, in case the man who was going to die wanted his blood to be shed, as a bid for salvation. In the years since, nobody has opted for the choice of being shot, and it is not likely that many will ever again take that course. Chances are, Gary Gilmore will remain the last man to die before a firing squad in America, as well as the last man to pay the Mormons’ rigorous cost of Blood Atonement.

  YEARS LATER, I would learn what my brother’s last words were. They stunned me when I heard them, they haunt me still. Gary Gilmore’s final words, before the life was shot out of him, were these: “There will always be a father.”

  I want you to take me

  Where I belong

  Where hearts has been broken

  With a kiss and a song

  Spend the rest of my days

  Without any cares

  Everyone understand me

  In the valley of tears

  Soft words has been spoken

  So sweet and low

  But my mind has made up

  Love has got to go

  Spend the rest of my day

  Without any care

  Everyone understand me

  In the valley of tears

  — FATS DOMINO AND

  DAVE BARTHOLOMEW,

  “Valley of Tears”

  SHORTLY AFTER GARY’S EXECUTION, I wrote an article about the turn of events for Rolling Stone. I did this because I felt that the experience that I and my family had just gone through had been shattering, and somehow writing about it helped make it bearable. Our lives had overnight exploded in a way that we could never have imagined, and for a long nightmare season, our history, our sins, and our shame had been part of a pageant that was headed inexorably toward a public death. There was no way to withstand that without also trying to purge it, and I think that being able to write about Gary’s death helped save an immediate part of my sanity. But the deed wasn’t without its cost. I had, of course, blown my cover. People now knew I was Gary’s brother, and many of them had comments to offer and questions to ask.

  Somewhere during this time, I decided I was tired of the day-to-day costs of my family and its infamy, and so I fled my hometown of Portland, Oregon, and moved to Los Angeles, where I had a job waiting at Rolling Stone. Meantime, Frank stayed with our mother, Bessie, in her run-down trailer in Oak Grove, Oregon.

  Life in Los Angeles was not easy at first. I drank a pint of whiskey every night, and I took Dalmane, a sleeping medication that interfered with my ability to dream—or at least made it hard for me to remember my dreams. And there were other lapses. I was still living with Andrea but seeing a couple of other women when I could. Plus, for a long season or two, my writing went to hell. I had trouble figuring out what to say and how to say it. I could no longer tell if the things I was writing about were worth writing about. I wasn’t sure any longer how you made words add up to anything. The editors at Rolling Stone were kind enough to keep me on staff and be patient with me. I guess they understood I was shell-shocked, and it would probably take me some time to come around.

  Instead of writing, I preferred reading hard-boiled crime fiction— particularly the novels of Ross Macdonald, in which the author tried to solve murders by explicating labyrinthine family histories. I also spent many nights lost in the dark glory of punk rock. I liked the way the music tried to make its listeners accommodate the reality of a merciless world. One of the best punk songs of the period was by a British band, the Adverts. It was called “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.” What would it be like, the song asked, to see the world through Gary Gilmore’s dead eyes? Would you see through the
eyes of somebody who wanted to kill the world, and then kill himself?

  All around me I had Gary’s notoriety to contend with. For my first few months in L.A.—and throughout the years that would follow— people asked me often about my brother. I met men who wanted to know what Gary was’ like—men who admired what they saw as his bravado, his hardness. I met women who wanted to sleep with me because I had been close to him. I avoided these people. I would live with being Gary’s brother, but I would not live with being one of his fans or supporters.

  I also met women who, when they learned who my brother was, would never see me again, never take my calls again. And I got letters from strangers who thought I had no right holding the job I was holding—writing for the attention of young people—since I had been related to a man who had murdered. I also got letters from people who thought I should have been shot alongside my brother.

  There was never a season without some reminder of what had happened. In 1979, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was published. By this time, Andrea and I had separated and I was seeing another woman—somebody I liked very much. As she read Mailer’s book, I could see her begin to wonder about who she was sleeping with, and about what had come into her life. One night a couple of months after the book had been published, we were watching Saturday Night Live. Eric Idle was the guest host, and he was doing a routine of flash impersonations. At one point, he tied a bandanna around his eyes and gleefully announced who he was impersonating: “Gary Gilmore!” I was sitting with this woman and a couple of friends, watching the Saturday Night episode. After the episode played out, I went and poured a glass of whiskey. Later that night, my girlfriend and I had a difficult talk. She announced that she was leaving me, and within a week she was gone. To be fair to her, she would later insist that her leaving had nothing to do with Gary, that it had to do with me. I’m sure she’s right—we had been having trouble for some time, and we both had made many mistakes. But at the time, it felt as though everything that went wrong had to do with who I was—a man who carried the mark of his family.

  It was a crushing moment in a long, bad stretch—a period in which almost every few days somebody would ask me: “You were Gary Gilmore’s younger brother, weren’t you? What did it feel like, having him die like that?”

  I was never really sure how to answer that question. I think I wanted to say: I’m no longer sure what it feels like. The emotions of the event, like the details and history of it, were something I could no longer claim as my own. You watch what was once a private and troubling relation of your life become the subject of public sensation and media scrutiny; you watch your brother’s life—and therefore, in some way, a part of your own life—become larger than the confines of your sway, and after a while, it doesn’t seem much like your life anymore. It doesn’t seem like something you should feel too much about, because feeling won’t erase the pain or shame or bad memories or unresolved love and hate.

  But I hated it every time the questions were asked. I tried for years to be polite or thick-skinned about it. I took comment after comment from people who betrayed their own intelligence and grace with the remarks and jokes they made, and each time, something inside me flinched. I felt that nobody would ever forget or forgive me just for being that dead fucking killer’s brother. I learned a bit of what it’s like to live on in the aftermath of the punishment: as a living relative, you have to take on some of the burden and legacy of the punishment. People can no longer insult or hurt Gary Gilmore, but because you are his brother—even if you’re not much like him—they can aim it at you. It’s as if anybody who has emerged from a family that yielded a murderer must also be formed by the same causes, the same evil, must in some way also be responsible for the violence that resulted, must also bear the mark of a frightening and shameful heritage. It’s as if there is guilt in the simple fact of the bloodline itself.

  I came to realize that Gary meant something different to many people than he meant to me—maybe he even meant more to some. Maybe he was a sign of power, or heroism, or disgust, or an exemplar of fame, or even somebody to be pitied or turned into a cause. Whatever he was, he was something they got to through me, but I knew enough to know that I wasn’t what they wanted. I wasn’t famous, and I wasn’t the criminal. I was a stand-in or substitute target for their reprehension or their fascination, sometimes both at the same time, since many people affect scorn for the killers they secretly admire or envy.

  There were days, during this time, that I wanted to kill the world. I suppose that in those moments I was finally like my brother in all respects except one: He was destroyed enough to pull the trigger, and I was not.

  AGAIN, I WAS MORE OR LESS LEAVING THE CURRENT-DAY REALITY of my family behind me. I would visit my mother up in Oak Grove, Oregon, a couple of times a year, but it was always disturbing. She had taken to talking incessantly about the past—about her childhood in Utah, about Gary’s execution—and her health was in wretched shape. After Gary’s death, she refused to leave her trailer, and my brother Frank and I could not convince her to see a doctor. She lived a reclusive existence, in a virtually crippled state, in a dark, closed-up, and dirty cubicle. When I visited there, I felt hemmed in. It was a hard place to breathe; we had the company of bad memories all around us in that space, and the promise of more to come.

  There were people, I know, who tried to reach her. Some members of the Mormon church came by to offer their sympathy and help, but she refused them. She would sit in her chair in the trailer, with all the windows and doors shut, and yell at her visitors: “What did you do to try to save him? Don’t come around now telling me you’re sorry, or that you know how I feel. You do not know how I feel.”

  Other times, when people knocked, she would sit there, not moving, not answering. This was something she had done for many years, even during our life on Oatfield. “If you don’t open the door to bad news,” I remember her saying, “then bad news can’t touch you.” My mother wasn’t about to open the door to anybody anymore, other than her remaining sons.

  She had good-enough reason. It was not that hard to figure out where she lived, and sometimes, late at night, about the hours the bars were letting out, she would be sitting in her chair in the kitchen, in the dark, and she would hear a car pull up outside. She would hear voices, whispers, laughs, profanities, threats. Some people yelled horrible things, some people threw bottles or cans at the trailer. She sat there in the dark, not moving, knowing full well that the world outside her walls was a world of no forgiveness.

  “Bessie suffered untold things the heart cannot bear,” one of her friends remarked later. “That was why she withdrew behind those walls.”

  I know that in my mother’s last few years, my absence hurt her much. I know because Grace McGinnis—who had resumed a telephone relationship with my mother by this time—told me so. I know because, on one of the interview tapes that Larry Schiller and Norman Mailer loaned me, my mother told Mailer: “I miss Mikal. I wish he’d move back up here. He hardly ever calls now, and when he does, he seems so distant, so damn polite. He treats me like something he’s afraid to touch.”

  She was right. I ran away. I couldn’t help her, and I couldn’t stand watching her die. I wanted to be as far from family as I could.

  If I had her now, I would call or see her every day. I would ask her things. I would tell her how much I love her, for what she endured and for trying to save me.

  But I don’t have her—I have only old photos and her voice on some tapes. I will never talk to her or see her again.

  IN DECEMBER 1980, JOHN LENNON, the former leader of the Beatles, was shot to death as he was entering his apartment building in New York City. When I heard the news, I went and visited with a friend of mine, Jim Henke, who was also my editor at Rolling Stone. We watched the news coverage, and we talked late into the after-midnight hours. It was hard to comprehend. Lennon’s murder seemed such a terrible payoff for a man who had helped form such a wonderful legacy, and who had enr
iched our lives beyond measure. It was as if a part of our past had been transformed and ruined, finished in bloodshed. Maybe I should have been accustomed to such endings, but I wasn’t. When I looked at Len non’s murder, I thought about the horrible murders that Gary had committed, and the terrible, mysterious way that Gaylen had been killed. Murder was a way of ending somebody’s—anybody’s—life story. It could come from anywhere, anytime. And it would not only end a life, but could also undermine every good memory or achievement that life had accomplished. I was tired of the ruin that came from killing, but that made no difference. Individual murders could be solved or punished, but murder itself, of course, could never be solved. That could not be done without solving the human heart, and without solving the history that has rendered that heart so dark and desolate.

  The day after Lennon was shot, my mother called me at my home in Los Angeles. “I wanted to see how you were doing,” she said. “I know you loved this man very much. I know you must be hurting.”

  She was a remarkable person. I knew it even in the moments when I wanted to be as far away from her as possible. My mother knew what loss was, she knew what it meant. It had destroyed her, but not so much that she couldn’t do something like this—calling her son after a hero of his had died, and letting him know she still cared for him and his hurt. On the phone with my mother that day, I was able to do something I wasn’t able to do with anyone else: I cried over John Lennon’s murder, and the way it had ravaged a certain treasured part of my past.

  At the end of our conversation, my mother made an offer. Actually, it was probably more of a plea. “Why don’t you come home for Christmas?” she asked. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. Sometimes it seems we’re hardly a family anymore. Ever since Gary died, it’s like it’s hard for the three of us to be in the same room together. But there won’t be many more Christmases that I get to see any of my sons. Won’t you come home this year?”

 

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