American Honor Killings

by David McConnell

  5

  A PRETTY MOUTH

  Some men, straight or deeply closeted, cling to an outlandish horror that homosexuality is capable of destroying their identity or their soul. There’s prison rape, and there’s prison rape. One is real, a devastating assault. The other is a fantasy, a source of giggly discomfort and bad jokes. Surprisingly, the straight guy’s horror is often more closely related to the silly fantasy than it is to the reality.

  The 1970s, when popular culture was a little more serious-minded, was a particularly rich time for macho folklore to explore the creepy idea of being unmanned. The overblown Leon Uris novel QB VII, published in 1970, introduced a world-famous violinist turned into a “eunuch” by a Nazi doctor. Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant Straw Dogs, ending with a sort of masculinity apocalypse, appeared in 1971. James Dickey’s book Deliverance came out in 1970, and the film followed in 1972. Lines from it, “He got a real pretty mouth, ain’t he?” and “I bet you can squeal like a pig. Weeeeeee!” soon rivaled dropping a bar of soap in the prison shower for heart-in-mouth snickers. James Clavell published his macho bodice-ripper Shõgun in 1975. That book is a parade of weird masculine fantasies including a strange scene of humiliation by being pissed on and glimpses of pederasty meant to cause shivers. In 1978 Oliver Stone gave us the screenplay for the male-rape “classic” Midnight Express, based on Billy Hayes’s 1977 book. And somewhere in those years an aged John Huston appeared on the Merv Griffin Show and offered with his gravelly chuckle that he’d like his tombstone to read that he’d tried everything except sex with another man. One man’s horror was another man’s fantasy. Both were unreal.

  For much longer than there have been superheroes and sidekicks, there have been stories that straight men find gripping and gay men find erotic or ridiculous. Modern awareness of homosexuality hasn’t done away with it. A highly regarded journalist told me a story he’d heard from “intelligence sources” in Washington. A terror suspect was being tracked by drone while crossing a Middle Eastern waste in a Mercedes. A roomful of military men at an intelligence center somewhere in the United States monitored a live video feed of the action. Dumbfounded and horrified, they watched as the Mercedes stopped abruptly and two people got out. The suspect bent his driver over the hood of the car and started fucking him. Gravely, the watchers in the room called in a missile strike and blew the two Arabs up. There are infinite reasons to be skeptical about this story, and it was told to me with that in mind, but who cares? As a “story” it’s pure James Clavell, and its currency—that it trickled down to me—says a lot about macho orientalism in government and journalistic circles.

  Feminists are right when they distinguish between rape (an act of violence) and sex. To men this often isn’t obvious without a moment of thought. But the same distinction exists between the two ways people think about sex between men. There’s the “horror” version, a struggle, a contest, an act of violence. And then there’s just sex, the helpless, compulsive act typical of human beings and other animals. The same genital instruments are used, so rape (or struggle) and sex look almost the same, and, of course, we muddy everything with our natural sense of play and metaphor. But the difference in desire and intent is vast, as big as the difference between putting a hammer to a nail and wanting to use one on a skull. We don’t call both of these just “hammering.”

  James Dickey’s “Mountain Man” is a character of barbaric masculinity who might turn any man into a “woman,” which means, in macho parlance—and it’s stunning how little-examined this definition remains—weak, dependent, owned, dominated. This is a masculine fantasy of struggle that couldn’t be further from real homosexuality. But it allows unreflective straight men (and many women and gay people!) to categorize gay men as the losers in a metaphorical contest of masculinity. Many people and cultures secretly believe that “topness/maleness” and “bottomness/femaleness” are unified characteristics more fundamental than sexuality and, consequently, that the only truly gay men are the passive ones—male women, basically.

  Straight men don’t believe they “fear” gay men as the word “homophobia” implies. I’ve even heard some “out” homophobes complain about the word because of this supposed inaccuracy. They want to be clear that they’re scornful, dismissive, contemptuous—not afraid—of gay men. If anything, they find lesbians more formidable. Mountain-man-uality might provoke an authentic fear, but that’s something else, not gay.

  Darrell Madden exhibited this thinking in an extreme, even pathological form. Though he was the rare double agent that “gay panic” stories seem to beg for, he also illustrated two other recurring images in masculine violence. One is a racist-skinhead-backwoods-hick character that seems to be a cousin to Dickey’s Mountain Man. The second is organization or gang behavior, the state of mind that allows someone to call a murder a “mission.”

  A killing back in 1999 involved a racist with none of Madden’s changeableness or flair for performance. Comparing that case to Steve Domer’s murder is interesting, because Billy Jack Gaither was similar in some ways to the Oklahoma man. And his killer was something of a youthful Mountain Man.

  Gaither, from Sylacauga, Alabama, was a gawky gentle giant. He was known for his instinctive kindness, goofy grins, intense family loyalty (he lived with his parents), and small-town notions of propriety. Like Sylacauga’s most famous son, Jim Nabors, Gaither went to Sylacauga High School and sang in his church choir.

  Billy Jack never told his parents, Lois and Marion, that he was gay. Nor did he tell them he wasn’t gay. His parents were of Nabors’s generation, and because this was Sylacauga, you could leave it at that. It wasn’t necessarily a case of Southern hypocrisy. Perhaps Billy was neither ashamed nor old-fashioned. Maybe the life he lived in Sylacauga was something modern and complex, like quantum mechanical superposition, gay and not gay at the same time.

  Monday through Friday Billy Jack drove down to Alexander City where he worked for Russell Athletic, a big maker of the not-too-stylish clothes they issue in high school PE classes. He wasn’t making a fortune, but he always had beer money. He could put a little aside and still afford nights out, sharp clothes and cowboy boots, a gold chain, a pricey haircut to offset his homeliness.

  Evenings he’d swan into the Tavern, a roadhouse on Route 280’s commercial strip (the Jim Nabors Highway). I visited the place much later. A couple of lonely mic stands and a junked beer sign sat on a tiny stage toward the rear of the Tavern’s single barnlike room. Twenty cheap black tables looked like they’d been set up for a chess tournament, except cigarette burns crawled over the tabletops and black leatherette upholstery like tent caterpillars.

  Billy Jack met his killer here. This was Billy Jack’s closeted, local hangout. He went to Birmingham to “be gay.” But he may have had a sly sexual MO even here. After the murder, a man in the Coosa County Jail claimed he’d once gotten a long, odd stare from Billy Jack, and later found a yellow Post-it on his car in the parking lot: For a blow job, call Billy Jack, along with a phone number.

  Now, that story was told to me by Billy Jack’s murderer, so take it for what it’s worth. At first the killer sounded reluctant to tell me, as if hesitating to defame the man he’d killed. He warmed up after a while and also told me that before burning Billy’s car he’d found a Post-it pad inside with five or six sheets prewritten with the same message. He complained that Billy’s religiosity had been exaggerated after his death. “I know cause he was driving me around on Sundays. He wasn’t the saint they made out.” None of this Post-it pickup or Sunday-driving behavior strikes me as remotely “bad,” even if his murderer thinks I’ll disapprove or disapproves himself. Probably the sourness comes out because he can’t dismiss the larger, and probably painful, truth of Billy’s charm and generosity toward him.

  In the winter of 1999 Gaither started giving rides to a new bar friend from the Tavern, a thuggish twenty-five-year-old named Steve Mullins. They didn’t talk much, and Billy didn’t tell Mullins anything about being gay. Mulli
ns wasn’t the type. Behind the boy’s countrified, half-comprehending face, shaved head, and goatee, Billy may have perceived a deeply rooted anger and opted to be cautious.

  On the web of his right thumb and forefinger Mullins had a crude tattoo of the same runic Schutzstaffel double lightning bolt that Darrell Madden wore on his neck. Mullins had gotten his in prison too. He’d done two and a half years for the burglary of a dentist’s office and forgery. Recently a bench warrant had been issued for him in Talladega County after he’d blown off a court appearance on a drunk driving charge. If he were spotted in Sylacauga he could be arrested. It was safer to lay low and let someone else do the driving. If Mullins needed a ride to Dollar General, for example, he’d call Billy Jack. He says others, as well—women—chauffeured him to the grocery store. Mullins wasn’t shy about using people. But he tells me he and Billy Jack traveled in different circles and didn’t like to be seen together. They didn’t know one another’s last name.

  Steve’s life was a mess just then. There was the bench warrant. He had no car, no job. Since prison he’d been living with Randall Jones ten miles outside Sylacauga. The only person who lifted his spirits, the only one who admired him, the only one he trusted, was Randall Jones’s half brother Charlesy Butler. Charlesy lived with his father, Charles Sr., on Ricks Lane, which was on the other side of Sylacauga, past where East Third Street crosses the railroad tracks. (East Third turns into the Millerville Highway then runs up through the Talladega National Forest.)

  Twenty-one-year-old Charlesy idolized Steve. In Steve, Charlesy found a guy who didn’t back down from confrontation. Steve had the balls to walk around town in a white- power T-shirt, pissing off the Baptists, the earnest New South high school kids, the glad-handing businesspeople, the antique store faggots, basically everyone. If a black guy happened to come into the Tavern, Steve would sit at the next table and loudly start in on “nigger” this and “nigger-lover” that. You’d watch the black guy’s face go hard and his insides turn to water. It wasn’t something anybody saw or expected anymore, even in the Deep South.

  Charlesy did construction grunt work like laying tarpaper shingles or mounting drywall for somebody’s new family room. (The gleaming white gypsum board he used had its origin in a prehistoric reef on that very spot—the famous Sylacauga marble formation.) He was small, very small, only five-three and 120 pounds. He had red-blond hair and the beardless, gypsum-white face of an angel. His large eyes appeared strangely flat, as if they weren’t set in his face so much as painted on, a sort of Celtic Fayum portrait. Steve’s interest in Charlesy was obvious. Who doesn’t like to have a follower? If the whole world thinks you’re trash, aren’t you drawn to the one person who treats you like a king?

  The story is basically about Charlesy and Steve, Steve and Billy Jack. It’s easy to imagine the minimalist conversations these two different pairs of friends would have had, full of drawled uh-huhs and mm-hmms. But in both cases a lot was being held back, important things weren’t getting across. Steve and Charlesy had a sort of superhero and sidekick relationship. With Billy Jack there were sexual undertones. But—everything will turn on this—Steve insists he had no idea that Billy Jack was gay.

  I’ve visited, and I can picture Billy Jack driving Steve back from Dollar General. They pass the hamlet of Gantt’s Quarry on the Sylacauga Fayetteville Highway. On the left is the old Alabama marble quarry. To the right a chestnut foal lopes up a rocky hillside pasture toward its mother. The sunbathed grass is cropped so close it looks like moth-eaten felt. They pull up to Randall Jones’s white trailer amid soaring cottonwoods on Cedar Creek Circle. Here, cheap houses have been built along the shores of the dammed Coosa River. This part of Fayetteville is a hunting/fishing/boating sort of a place.

  Under the nonverbal play of Billy Jack’s imagined relationship with him, the angry Steve must have loitered like the shadow of a gar under the surface of the Coosa. Mullins tells me it happened like this: One day they were on the phone together and completely out of the blue Billy Jack said, “‘I want to suck your dick.’ I was like, ‘Huh?’ He says it again, ‘I want to suck your dick.’” Invisibly, Mullins’s immense hatred slewed toward the other man like the gar drifting in to strike. He says he was so shocked the first thing he thought was, I gotta kill you. The key was the shock, the surprise, the sneaky-seeming unexpectedness, not just the idea of homosexuality. That becomes clear later.

  But how could a mere surprise affect someone so deeply? Mullins says he immediately started telling people he was going to kill Billy Jack. It was a matter of honor. “I told a LOT of people. I told them Billy was a secret fag. One said, ‘You gotta do it alone.’” Others advised just beating him up. “I talked about it for weeks.” He says now that Randall Jones and Preston, another of Charlesy’s brothers, had a gay friend and that “gay” was no big deal for any of them (except Charlesy himself). It was something about the surprise. I want to say, perhaps, “uppityness” too.

  Mullins was more explosive than anyone knew, more than he knew himself. Somehow he’d become a kind of kid Mountain Man, though he hadn’t been raised that way. He recites for me his mother’s set of inflexible rules: “Don’t have no friends who are black, who live in trailers, who have tattoos, who have single moms, who drive motorcycles.” But Mullins also says he was constantly depressed as a child and started drinking at ten, smoking pot at twelve or thirteen. At around sixteen, he ran away from home after a fight. His mom shouted, “Don’t take nothing with you!”

  He says he started living in the “projects” with two other white guys. Everyone else there was black. He had black girlfriends and worked with a black drug dealer. But the racism he’d grown up with must have been intense, because in prison later he remembers feeling a repulsion for black inmates. Even African traits like black curly hair caused him to drift into a sick fantasy of splitting the black man’s head open with an ax.

  He tells me about one elaborate daydream he and a friend spun about murdering “a minority.” The fantasy is horrifying and prefigures, in a few details and by many years, the murder of Billy Jack Gaither. It’s as if that murder were somehow preexistent, awaiting the slightest jar to set it in motion.

  “It was going to be a crackhead,” Mullins tells me. “A nigger, a Mexican. We didn’t even know any fags.” He and his friend would trick the victim into a car, drive him to a secluded place, chain him to a low branch, and steady his feet with weights somehow. They’d pile tires underneath and douse them with gasoline, maybe make the guy swallow some, and then light him on fire. It was all about the fire. (I can’t help being reminded of Darrell Madden and Brad Qualls verbally rehearsing their murder of Steve Domer. But while the charming Madden can recount every horror fluently, the rumbling, dangerous-seeming Mullins is full of awkwardness and hesitation as he relates his story. I have the feeling there was even more to this fantasy than he can bring himself to tell me.)

  On February 19, a Friday, at 8:12 in the morning, Steve phoned Charlesy Butler. Steve claims in one interview that he woke up that morning and the dire act was simply there, in his mind, ready to happen. “I just woke up and knew.” To me he adds, “I went through the day like a well-oiled machine.”

  It had been drizzly on and off for three days. By midday the temperature rose to the upper fifties. The radio said it would finally clear overnight. Steve called Charlesy again at four in the afternoon. They talked. Mullins says both calls were about the murder. Immediately afterward, Steve called Billy Jack. Billy was at work in Alexander City. They talked about doing something that evening.

  The events leading up to the murder are clear except for a crucial disagreement. Mullins says he talked about his plan to Charlesy and to “a lot” of people in the weeks before the crime. Charlesy denies it. (Wider knowledge about the coming murder has never been suspected.)

  That evening Billy Jack swung by Cedar Creek Circle to pick up Steve Mullins. He drove a subcompact with dull purple metallic paint. He was carrying a six-pack of Bu
d Light. At about eight thirty p.m. the two men pulled into the Tavern parking lot. Billy went in to collect twenty dollars someone had borrowed and was inside almost an hour. From the Tavern, they drove to a place called the Frame. This time Steve went in and Billy Jack waited in the car. Steve found Charlesy inside playing pool. Charlesy and his father had come there straight from work in Birmingham (Charlesy was learning his father’s trade, crane operator). The boy needed to wash and change.

  Billy drove them both out East Third Street across the Norfolk Southern tracks. He passed his own church on the right, Eastside Baptist, a tidy modern brick building with a skinny, prefab white steeple. As promised the weather was clearing. They were already in the Talladega National Forest. East Third had become the Millerville Highway. Up here, in the woods to the left, were Ricks Lane and Charles Sr.’s place.

  Mullins tells me he and Charlesy talked about the murder again in the house while Billy Jack waited outside. He says he casually mentioned a three-way to Billy as he got back into the car. Charlesy knew a quiet spot by the watersheds nearby, a boat launch. What locals called the “watersheds” were a series of little lakes, picturesque basins slotted amongst the hills of the national forest. An access road to Lake Victoria and Little Wills Lake was only a mile or so farther along the Millerville Highway.

  Here, versions of the story diverge. This is how Mullins tells it: At the boat launch Charlesy stepped aside to pee. Billy Jack got out, took off his glasses, and came around behind the car. Steve joined him. Hands in the pouch of his white sweatshirt, Steve fingered an ordinary pocketknife with a black plastic handle. He pried open the three-inch blade with his thumbnail. He shook the knife from his sweatshirt pouch, pushed Billy to his knees from behind, reached around, and cut his throat. (“He was watching Charlesy take a leak. It was the right time. It pissed me off,” he said later.) He stabbed Billy twice in the back.