Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  A few days later I saw the film and found it in many ways unsparingly true to its subject. It presented, with little embroidery and no sentimentality, a fast-moving narrative account of Gary’s life in Provo, Utah, and it showed the mounting of his rage and the venting of it in two senseless murders. And it showed his subsequent, relentless pursuit of his own negation, culminating in execution. But I felt the film also missed plenty: It missed Gary, and in doing so, it missed its one opportunity at recreating or salvaging a soul. There simply wasn’t much in the manner of actor Tommy Lee Jones that suggested Gary as he really was, nor was there much that showed the real reach of Gary’s deadliness or the range of his intelligence. Perhaps most problematically, there was also little attempt to animate the promptings behind Gary’s pursuit of his own death, and without an understanding of that, I felt, the other details and actions of his story fell flat.

  On a summer evening a week or so after seeing the film, I sat in Schiller’s backyard with him and shared my reactions to his movie. “Well,” he replied, “you’re right. This Gary is certainly not the Gary I met or the Gary that you knew as a blood relative … But I also think this Gary takes you to the same end result as the real one.”

  Schiller regarded me quietly for a moment and then said: “Now I want to ask you a question. Why have you waited until now to have anything to do with this story? Why didn’t you give me an interview for Norman’s book when I asked you for one?”

  Because, I told him, more than anything else I simply wanted to retain my own voice about matters concerning Gary. I didn’t want to give somebody an interview and then later feel I had forfeited control over my own words.

  Schiller nodded. “Retaining your own voice. I think I might have understood had you explained it to me the way you did just now. You see, I looked upon you as a crucial spoke in the wheel of this story that I could never get.”

  Also, I went on, it seemed clear to me in Utah that the most important part of Gary’s worth as news item or literary property was the event—in effect, the staging—of his death. That it seemed clear that Gary was probably worth more to Schiller …

  Schiller finished the thought for me, “…dead than alive. Which, in fact, he wasn’t.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Nah. Gary Gilmore wasn’t worth anything dead. His story would have had more social significance if he had just disappeared back on death row again.”

  “In what way?”

  “Because then, truly, we would have seen how the public can give an event its importance, but how they can do away with that importance, too. I wish my film had that ending.”

  “But didn’t you ever ask yourself whether your involvement was going to help determine the execution?”

  “I don’t think our actions actually determined Gary’s death,” Schiller replied, “but I think they determined the entire size of his death. If the media, myself included, had decided to move out of town two weeks before the execution, Gary’s death would not have been as important as our coverage made it seem.

  “You see, regardless of what you may think, I did not want to see Gary executed. I certainly had deep feelings about the value of a life, but I also understood that Gary had the right—the inalienable right—to choose his own destiny. I wasn’t necessarily convinced he was bringing harm to anybody else by choosing to die that way.”

  It was late on a hot summer night. The only noise around us was the rustle of trees as the night air shifted and began to slough off some of its heat. I found that I was sitting across a table from a man for whom I once felt the strongest dislike, and I discovered, to my surprise, that I could no longer summon up that rancor.

  TOWARD THE END OF MY DISCUSSIONS with Larry Schiller, I asked him about getting in touch with Nicole Barrett Baker, the girlfriend whom Gary had left behind. I had, in fact, never met or spoken with Nicole. When I visited Gary in Utah the week before his execution, she was still hospitalized following a joint suicide attempt with Gary. I tried to find some way to establish communication with her—in part, because Gary had asked me to, and also because the pain and confusion of the moment seemed to suggest reaching out to someone—but I could find no way around the strict confinement of her hospital. The closest I came to getting any message to her was by calling a Salt Lake radio station and asking them to play a song for her at Gary’s request. It was Gary’s favorite old rhythm & blues song, Fats Domino’s “Valley of Tears.”

  In the years that followed, there wasn’t a month that passed that I didn’t think of making some belated contact—in part, because something about the events surrounding Gary’s death had always seemed unresolved to me. But the only way I knew to find her was through Larry Schiller and, by my own choice, I had shut off that course. Also, I probably wasn’t ready. Meeting Nicole would be something like confronting a living reminder of Gary’s losses, and there were times when that would have been too much.

  Now, though, with the address that Schiller had furnished me, I sat down and wrote Nicole a letter, telling her about what I was doing and asking her if she would be willing to meet and talk. A few weeks later, I flew up to the small town where she was living in Oregon. The Nicole who met me at the airport seemed every bit as lovely as the Nicole played by Rosanna Arquette in the film, though also a good deal shyer and more self-possessed. Apparently, the last couple of years had worked some well-deserved kindly changes: Nicole was now a happily married, born-again Christian and the mother of a new baby boy. We greeted each other with a little uncertainty and headed out to an all-night restaurant for dinner.

  We talked for hours, but it took us a while to get around to Gary. She told me about her marriage and her Christianity; I told her about my marriage, and why I loved rock & roll so much. We talked a lot for the next few days, and in time we could talk about Gary and what had happened. The funny thing was, it took us a while to sort through all our own, real memories and the written and filmed accounts of what had happened in our lives. Somewhere in the midst of all the interpretations of real life, we realized, it was far too easy to lose part of the elements of our real selves.

  During the last night I saw Nicole, we went for a long drive in the Oregon coastal woods. We talked about our memories of the time around Gary’s execution. I told her about my last visits with Gary—how, despite all the distance and difficulty between us, we found a way to say goodbye with a bit of hard-earned mutual regard.

  “You know,” said Nicole, “I never got to say good-bye to Gary.” She fell quiet for a few moments and stared into the dark as we sped down the highway. “One night,” she continued, “when I was staying at a house Larry had rented for me in Malibu after the execution, I had this dream about Gary. He came up to the house on this big motorcycle. He didn’t say much, but I knew he wanted me to go with him. I climbed on behind him and just held on tight, and we rode a long, long way. Finally, we came to a strip of land that stuck out into the sea. Out at the end of it stood this prison—but not the kind with guards or gates. More like a place where people go before leaving for somewhere else.

  “On the inside, there were walls of white stone. Gary got off the motorcycle and said ‘Good-bye.’ I said, ‘I can’t go with you?’ And he said, ‘No, you don’t understand. You won’t be seeing me again’ started to cry then, just as hard as I had ever cried in real life. Then I looked around and saw another woman sitting close by, crying. It was your mother. I went over and held her close, and we cried together.”

  We were both quiet for a long time, and then I asked Nicole: “Do you find yourself still thinking about him much?”

  She looked at me a moment, smiled, and looked back out the window. “Oh,” she said, “the way the sun will set at night—sometimes that will remind me of Gary.” I thought about her words for a moment and realized what she was saying: Always.

  Outside, the hill ranges of the small coastal town glided by, black silhouettes against the starlit sky. I came to understand that meeting Nicole had been a
powerful experience, and a nice one. It reminded me that in real life, the truths of our hearts and memories never finish running their risks. Also, it felt a little like being part of a family—and that was something I hadn’t felt for a long while.

  A few minutes later, Nicole dropped me back at my motel. “I hate good-byes,” she said, flashing a timid smile.

  “I’m not good at them myself,” I replied.

  I gave her a kiss, then watched her back her car out, turn and wave, and drive away. She went back to her life, and I went back to mine. It was all we could do.

  MAYBE THAT SEEMS LIKE WHERE THIS STORY SHOULD END. Maybe it feels like a closure of sorts. Maybe it even carries a hint of redemption about it. At least, that’s the way it felt back in the autumn of 1982, when I wrote about meeting Nicole at the end of my article about The Executioner’s Song for Rolling Stone. I thought: Here is what I have to learn— what we all have had to learn: Our lives go on. We have to imbibe the pain, face the memories, and forgive what we can. All in all, not the worst truth to learn.

  But the problem is, our lives do go on, and life has no real closure, except death. It is death that tells us that a story’s ended—that it is now time to evaluate the life that is finished, to reckon its plot and its drama, and to tell its stories. Gary and all those others who had joined the dead—the members of my family, the men Gary murdered—they were the only ones in this story who had any claims to closure, the only ones who had completed their parts, who had finished paying for or escaping the legacy. The rest of us were still living the lives that had to go beyond final pages, lives in which the bequests of the dead have never ended.

  MY LIFE DID NOT ALWAYS GO IN GOOD PLACES, though on one level it probably seemed to. My career as a music journalist was a fairly fortunate one. I left Rolling Stone in 1980 for a few years, though I continued to write for the magazine. I went on to become the music editor at L.A. Weekly for a while, and then worked for five years as the pop music critic at the now-defunct, much-missed Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I did some of my favorite work as a writer during this period—I felt, for the first time in years, that I had found a critical voice that I was confident with. I also had the chance to meet and interview some of the people whose music had affected me most deeply over the years, including Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Johnny Rotten, Bruce Springsteen, and my favorite music hero of all, Lou Reed.

  I do not mention this information to boast, though I am proud of much of the music journalism I have done, and grateful to the various editors who gave me the opportunity to grow as a writer. I mention my work because, although I had a true and constant passion for rock & roll and other forms of popular music and culture, my work was not really where I lived the most important part of my life, nor for that matter did it always give me a sense that my life had amounted to much. When the day’s writing was done, I still had to go home and face the real life I was living. My marriage had been in trouble more or less from the start. I think we both had brought too many family demons to live together in one house, and to be honest, I wasn’t understanding or supportive enough of the fears and damage that had driven my wife into her troubled space. The union was probably fated the moment I realized that I hadn’t so much loved my wife as I’d tried to save her, maybe as a way of atoning of how I had not tried to save my brother. That didn’t make for a well-balanced marriage, and when, at the end of one of our particularly painful arguments, Erin said to me, “You don’t need me the way I need you,” I saw that she was right, and I understood how unfair I had been. We separated a little over two years after we were married, and were divorced in 1985. We remained good if troubled friends afterward, and once or twice over the years we tried to find ways back to each other, but I’m afraid too much damage had been done by that time. She remains somebody I love, and somebody I still hope the best for.

  After that, it was pretty much one feverish relationship after another. I was getting older, and I desperately wanted to find somebody I could build a family and home with. And then, for far too long, I simply stopped wanting any home or family, because it hurt too much, felt too much like irredeemable failure, to want those things and yet feel I would never have them or might damage them once I did. Then, perhaps not surprisingly, I fell into a bout of clinical depression. I would be sitting doing my work, or listening to music, or reading a book, when sudden fear would grip me. I would go and lie on my bed and curl up for hours at a time, waiting for the darkness to pass, waiting for a chance to breathe normally. I found myself doing the same thing I had done as a child during those hours of my odd spells of illness: I’d grip my hands tight, concentrating on my palms. It felt as if at the center of them there was some relief or answer to be found, if I could just press them hard enough.

  I knew enough about depression to know that it could get worse, or possibly turn fatal. I went into therapy with a good doctor, and in time the fear and other symptoms began to lift. Life began to regain some of its fundamental pleasures and purposes. The entire bout probably only lasted a few months but it felt like an eternity. Depression is a hard experience to communicate, and perhaps a hard one to understand, but once you’ve had it you don’t forget it. It makes you look on the rest of the world with a bit more compassion, and it also causes you to watch the corners of your life more closely, so you can spot the darkness rapidly if it begins to creep back in.

  DURING THIS TIME, I SIGNED A CONTRACT to write a book about a musical group. I shouldn’t have done this—I didn’t have enough real feeling for the subject at the time—but I thought I wanted to change some things in my life, and I thought I knew enough about writing and music that I could summon the passion. After nearly a year, I hadn’t written anything, and I knew I wasn’t going to. Instead, I came up with an idea to do a different book about another music group, the Grateful Dead. It was a good idea. The Dead is a fascinating group with a remarkable history, and by telling the band’s story, one could examine an important period in modern American culture. Maybe I would actually have risen to the task this time, but I made a near-fatal mistake: I fell in love.

  This is not a proud story that I am about to relate. It involved the betrayal of one or two people who loved and trusted me, and it involved embarrassing ruin. I met a woman—whom I’ll call Roxanne—during a vacation to Portland, while I was researching the Grateful Dead project. Actually, I’d known her casually for years. She was the younger sister of an old girlfriend. At the time, she was recently divorced and the mother of a four-year-old boy. She was looking for a change in her life, and of course I was too. It was an affair like many others. At first it was a secret, and as a result the passion that we brought to our meetings and couplings took on a special intensity—the sort of passion that makes love feel imperative. But there was more to it than that. I had told Roxanne a bit about my dream of having my own family, and she told me that she hoped someday to have more children. We talked about whether we could someday merge our dreams, and it seemed that maybe we could.

  I moved up to Portland for a while to do some of the writing of my book, and also to see what might come of this love affair. I went there with the conviction that I’d finally won a real shot at happiness—that I could now build a family of my own. I even told myself that I was redeeming not only my own history, but perhaps my family’s as well, by building life back in the place where once so much had ended in death and loss.

  Well, it didn’t work. Within two days of my arrival in Portland, I could tell something was dreadfully wrong between us. As it turned out, Roxanne had met somebody whom she had a stronger interest in. We fought, we parted, and she went on to marry the other person and have a child with him. These things happen. There was really nobody to blame but myself, and there was nobody to forgive but myself. But this time, self-forgiveness did not come easy.

  It was not a pretty time. I sat around in my apartment in Portland and wept uncontrollably. I drank myself to sleep most nights, and I couldn’t concen
trate on the work I had to do. Finally I gave up on the book.

  I probably came as close to self-destruction as I have ever come, or at least as close as I knew how to come. And when I understood I didn’t have whatever it took to finish it all, or didn’t even have the ability to fall apart entirely, the realization didn’t make me feel any better. It made me feel like there was simply no relief, no deliverance for what my life had become, and that I would have to live with that awareness whether I wanted to or not.

  THAT WAS WHEN I SAW THE GHOST.

  It was late at night, about 3 A.M. I had fallen asleep drunk, but it was fitful sleep. I was living in a loft apartment near downtown, and lights from the street bounced off the walls throughout the night, making for a steady sense of motion in the place. I opened my eyes and saw something moving. Lights, I thought, and closed my eyes. Then I heard a floorboard creak. I opened my eyes, and across the room from me I saw a woman. She was lambent—she had an amber glow about her—and I could see that she was tall and blond, dressed in white. She walked back and forth at the foot of my bed, talking, saying things in a lulling, attractive voice. She moved onto the bed and straddled me, riding up to my chest. She gripped me by the wrists and twisted the upper part of my body, until she had forced my hands and arms against the wall in a painful arrangement. She bent over and kissed my ear, and said: “I know you. You’re the last one. I’ve taken everything from all of them, and now I’ve come for you.”

  I woke up, my wrists pressed against the wall, hard enough to hurt. I looked around in the neon-lit dark. There was nobody there. I got up and made my way through the apartment. I was alone.

  Had I seen a real ghost? No, of course not. It was likely the sort of dream that some doctors call a night terror: a dream that occurs in a certain state of sleep consciousness and has a sense of physical reality and threat about it. Such dreams are common in some cultures, and many people, it is believed, have died in their sleep from them, frightened into heart failure.