The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  Dennis explained that he was there as a writer. Gilmore wanted to discuss the possibility of doing an interview with him.

  "Oh," said Smith, "we can't let any writers in."

  "Well, Gilmore wants to see me. He sent the Chaplain."

  Smith shook his head. These were very Warden-type energies, Dennis decided. Many layers of control over fear—didn't want anything to interfere with that control.

  "What is this?" said Dennis, starting to get angry. "The man's going to die soon, and no one's getting any access to him. He wants to see me. He wants to talk."

  "I just can't let any writers in," said Smith. Man, his body was rigid. For a big man, Smith moved all right, but he sure was tightly controlled. Dennis didn't like him, not the way he'd sit in his chair, cold, worried, not smiling.

  Sam Smith sat there thinking for a long time. His next remark surprised Dennis. "Well," said the Warden, "you are a lawyer."

  He sure knows, thought Dennis, a lot more about me than he has let on up to now.

  From California, Dennis told him. Well, murmured Sam Smith in reply, we couldn't interfere with Gilmore's right to see a lawyer.

  Now Boaz was beginning to get it. Could it be that Smith wanted him around instead of Esplin and Snyder? Even if they had been fired, they were still the only Gilmore lawyers in existence. Already, they had caused a delay. Of course! The Warden wanted the execution to take place on time.

  Sam Smith still wasn't friendly. In fact, you might say he was physically intimidating. But now he said in that quiet voice, never looking at Boaz, that the only way Mr. Boaz could get in was as a legal counselor. Something would have to be put in writing to that effect.

  Dennis drafted a note to say he wouldn't do magazine or newspaper articles, and was in the prison as a lawyer. He added, however, that he was writing this at the Warden's request, and made a point of saying, "Our agreement is illegal." The Warden was angered. It came off him like the radiation from a heated iron skillet. Obviously, these procedures all meant a great deal to Sam Smith. The man had something to prove.

  Boaz was let in, but without his tape recorder. A guard took him outside the Administration Building and they walked in the November air about a hundred yards over to Maximum Security, one ugly squat building by itself. There Boaz was put in a fairly large visiting room, maybe 40 by 25, with only a guard in a bulletproof glass cage to keep an eye on him. That guard was controlling the door to get in and out, but probably couldn't hear much inside his booth. He was half asleep. Stupor on top of old woe was the sad vibration Dennis was getting from Maximum.

  Dennis's first impression was that an intelligence had just come into the room. Gilmore showed a quiet in-drawn face. Dennis thought he might not have noticed him on the street unless they made eye contact. Gilmore had smoky gray-blue eyes with a lot of light in them.

  Startling. A direct clear gaze. Since he was wearing the loose white coveralls of Maximum Security, and had come into the room barefoot, Dennis could see him as a holy man in New Delhi.

  They got off to a good start. Boaz laid an awful lot down real fast.

  Told of his law background, Boalt Hall at Berkeley—Gary's nod showed he knew these were worthy credentials—and of the time he had put in as assistant prosecutor in the D.A.'s office of Contra Costa County a little northwest of San Francisco. He had been a pot-smoking prosecutor, he made a point of telling Gary. While he had dealt in the punitive side of the law, his sympathies were more to the defense.

  That was probably because of listening to Ginsberg and Kerouac back in the late fifties when just a college freshman—he and Gilmore must be about the same age, they agreed—and then later giving his sympathies to people like Mario Savio, Jerry Rubin, and the Berkeley movement in general. He pinpointed his life with these names—Gilmore knew the names.

  Lately, he had not practiced much law, Boaz said. Too restricting.

  He was interested more in the consciousness movement, encounter groups, meditation, Sufi, the process called Fischer-Hoffman. He had come out of that process so moved by the transformations in himself that he became a Fischer-Hoffman counselor. Still he came to find that restricting. So, in his mind at least, he had moved on to Findhorn. He liked the idea that there was a place where twenty-pound cabbages could be grown in an inch of topsoil way up in Scotland, and even flowers could bloom in the winter through your attunement to the plants and your ability to guide the energies as they came down.

  Gilmore took it all in, and came back with good questions. Boaz was kind of blown out of it. Gilmore was offering the best intellectual conversation he'd had since coming to Salt Lake City. Bizarre.

  They were rapping about books, a fast heavy rap, and Gary was talking about Demian by Hermann Hesse, and Catchuz, Ken Kesey, Alan Watts, Death in Venice. He called the author Tom Mann, and said, "the pretty boy knocked me out." Finally he said, "I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote." It wasn't so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.

  Dennis wasn't hearing ideas that were new to him, hell, by comparison to most, he was pretty cultivated in these matters even if, by his own measure, a dilettante. Still he was conversant, and so was impressed that Gilmore was actually this familiar with the consciousness stuff. While, essentially, Gary had nothing new to contribute, still he had done a good deal of thinking on the subject. "You cannot escape yourself," Gilmore said. "You have to meet yourself."

  Dennis was all for that. You were responsible for your actions.

  But he thought Gilmore was a little dogmatic about reincarnation. In that area, Boaz had no intense belief himself—reincarnation was just one possibility among others. "Look, Gary," he said—he had decided to play devil's advocate—"I've been with a person who said he'd take me back into my past lives, and we did some exercises. I can play that game. I was supposed to have died on the rack in the fourteenth century, and then I was Pan at another time. I looked down and saw those cloven feet—right? Could have been nothing but my creative imagination. I don't know. I'm open, but I don't find it relevant. I think one can have ethics without getting into reincarnation."

  Gilmore shook his head. "There is reincarnation," he said, "I know."

  Boaz dropped it. No matter how you might love a discussion, you had to sense when to give way.

  They got into numerology. Gilmore's birthday added up to 21. In tarot, that was the card for The Universe. 2 and 1 also made 3, a fortunate number, The Empress. In turn, Boaz's birthday summed up to The Emperor and The Fool.

  "We're balanced," said Boaz, giggling.

  "Yeah," said Gilmore, "we're good partners."

  If you assigned numbers to the letters in the name, however, Gary added up to seven, and Gilmore to six. Thirteen was the card for death. Boaz could feel that vibration going right through Gilmore, What a waste, he thought, what a shame. He's down to the last week of his life. It made him sad that he was one of the very few people to realize Gilmore was serious about dying with dignity, and he told him so.

  Gilmore nodded. "I'm ready to give you the interview," he said, but added, "I'd like some help. Will you be my lawyer?"

  If he agreed, thought Dennis, a lot of people were sure not going to understand. It was going to be awfully difficult professionally. But what an experience!

  "God," said Dennis, "do you know the kind of reputation I'm going to get for this?"

  "You can handle it," Gary said.

  Boaz nodded. He could handle it. Still, he had to say, "I feel like Judas helping you get executed."

  "Judas," said Gary, "was the most bum-beefed man in history."

  Judas knew what was going down, Gilmore said. Judas was there to help Jesus tune into the prophecy.

  Now that they had agreed to work together, Boaz began to ponder the tougher side of Gary. Macho to a certain extent. Of course, he had had to use a gun to prove his power. Lived in ultimates. Must have been a very sensitive child.
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  At this point, Gary said, "It's like I'm the Fonz and you're Richie." That made Dennis think of his eighth grade in Fresno and the element in school who got girls and smoked and looked at porno photographs and drank illicit booze, all the while that he was still naive about it.

  On the way out, Gilmore said, "I want you to come every day."

  Boaz promised he would. He had been there close to three hours.

  Sam Smith wanted to know how it had gone. Came up to Dennis in the hall and gave a smile. "Well, Mr. Boaz," asked Sam Smith, "are you really with us?" With Us?

  It brought in response, a grin to Dennis's face. The Defense Attorney buddying with the Warden. "Yeah, I'm with you, Warden."

  Yeah. All the way.

  Even though they got to California years after the Okies migrated from the dust bowl, Boaz's folks were touchy about coming from Oklahoma. All through the Depression and the Second World War, Okie had been a bad word in Fresno. It didn't matter that Dennis's stepfather was a Staff Sergeant in the Army, it was still a stigma. As a kid, Dennis would say things like "my brother, he . . . " and in elementary school they made him take a remedial English course. He would make up for that by getting good grades in high school, and working on diction and making friends with kids from middle-class parents. Wanted to establish himself as a Californian.

  When he was older, however, he could appreciate his heritage. A part of him never did get won over by all this middle-class ethos. But he had worked at it. He got elected student body president in the ninth grade, played basketball, and was captain of the tennis team in high school, yet he always knew he was being an overachiever and all through college and law school, he had this big division in himself. Would he opt for that job as Assistant D.A. up in Contra Costa County, or go for an underground thing about the right to play, and the pursuit of happiness?

  A third of the Prosecutors in the Contra Costa office, the younger ones, smoked pot all the while they were working under bosses with narrow attitudes and that FBI mentality—white short-sleeved shirts and skinny black ties.

  In one party at a two-story bungalow a half-dozen young Prosecutors, including Dennis, drifted up to the attic for a toke, while down below their bosses were imbibing alcohol in the living room.

  The true juxtaposition between booze and grass. The bosses—you could say, the boozers—were down in hell, and Dennis and all his associates upstairs in heaven.

  About then, Dennis got married to a beautiful woman, and helped raise her son. Dennis had been brought up by a stepfather and had ended as a stepfather. Good symmetry helped to maintain good emotion. It was a good marriage for a while. He left the D.A.'s office, did criminal defense, and enjoyed that. It was more dramatic to fight in Court for someone's liberty than to protect their money. He and his wife, Ariadne, during that time, also took a taste of the sensuous aspects of the right to play. The selfish things, good cars, French food, trips to Europe.

  Then he and Ariadne went off in different directions. Divorce was a shock point. Dennis got less interested in his practice. Law was dealing with property problems, and here was he with psychological problems. He moved over into consciousness raising, and hung in with a Hindu named Harish. In orbit around the guru were physicists, poets, artists, physicians, musicians, and theatre people. A group of them formed Maya Modulation. They all put money into a sound film that was going to be made in India, but one of the members died over there. The whole thing kind of collapsed.

  By '75, Dennis was fiat-out broke, and determined to live as a writer. Flopped in Ariadne Street in East Oakland with an old handball-playing partner, and a mad jogger. The house smelled of track shoes and sweat socks. Dennis slept on a couch in the front room for six months. There were dog's hairballs all over the house on Ariadne Street. Still, it was the name of his ex-wife. Good vibes in that synchronicity. He also had a couple of lady friends who took pity on a struggling writer and gave him nurturing.

  But by '76, he was on a yo-yo. A couple of weeks of free room and board with his mother meant living with her annoyance that a successful young lawyer had let it all go. A couple of months with a buddy who ran an after-hours club meant no sleep and no writing.

  Next he painted a house for his real father. Dennis was living by his wits. Of course, he loved brinkmanship.

  But he decided to go back to the law. He also cared about responsibility. His real father was a pipe fitter, and Dennis never wanted to lose his identity with the working class. In fact, he'd even worked in college as a teamster. So now he took up this retainer for the bus drivers' union in Salt Lake and got ready to prepare a lawsuit against the bus companies who were not allowing bus drivers to use CBs. As Dennis saw it, CBs could save lives in emergencies. He was, therefore, commuting by Saab between California and Utah, when, on the last of these swings, he saw the dead man on the highway while coming back to Salt Lake to vote for Carter.

  Dennis had already visited Temple Square and looked at the building where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang, and in the Visitors Center he had listened to the guide tell the story of God coming to Joseph Smith with the golden plates of the Angel Moroni. Dennis couldn't help it, he had a big reaction: there were these angels Mormon and Moroni, two angels directly under God, just as important as Peter and Paul in Mormon circles, and their names had something to tell him.

  It was only after he had walked up to the Capitol Building and was standing on the steps, looking down the hill and out across Salt Lake City, that it came to him. From here, on a clear day, you could see across half of Utah. Only today it was not clear. There never was that clear a day in Salt Lake anymore. Once, the desert of Utah had been as beautiful as the deserts of Palestine in the Old Testament, but now it looked no better than the outskirts of Los Angeles. Shacky ranch houses stretched as far as the smog would allow the eye to see, and off to the west were the smelters of Anaconda Copper pouring up into the pollution of the sky. Dennis really got it then. Those angels, Mormon and Moroni, meant More Money. No wonder the Mormons were getting to be the richest church in America. All that sanction to make More and More Money. Dennis giggled. His consciousness was now raised to deal with the Attorney General.

  Now, one week later, his life was on the brink of great change. He was going up the hill to the State Capitol with its beautiful dome that he had looked at so often, for it was visible just about anywhere below in Salt Lake. Dennis was certainly feeling up for the occasion.

  Today he was going to lay his calling card on the Attorney General's desk, and declare that Gilmore wanted Dennis Boaz to be his lawyer tomorrow before the Utah Supreme Court and there argue his right not to have any delay of execution. It was going to be no ordinary meeting, and Dennis took his time going through the building.

  He was trying to pick up the aura of these old Mormons. The piety in the air was like the heavy piety you could find in all courtrooms and governmental buildings, except without the old stale cigar smoke.

  Maybe there was less payola in this piety. It sure smelled of reverential air. Like we will all be present on Day One when the Lord makes His appearance.

  Intrigued with the similarity of the names, Dennis knew nonetheless that the A.G. elect, Robert Hansen, was no relation to Phil Hansen, former Attorney General and best-known criminal lawyer in Utah. No, this Hansen, Robert Hansen, had been elected just last week from Assistant A.G. to Attorney General.

  He did not look bad in Dennis's eyes. Kind of friendly anal curt. A well-built good-looking right-winger, dark hair, glasses, sort of Republican cabinet material—a Clark Kent character. They talked about law schools right off, and Boaz knew he had gotten to a good place in Bob Hansen's mind when he said Boalt. Hansen replied that he had gone to Hastings. Right. Right. It was all so neat and formal in this big walnut-paneled office with blue rugs, dark blue velvet drapes.

  The media, Hansen explained, were assuming that his office was cooperating with Gilmore's desire to die, even piggybacking on it.

  However, the Attorney Gene
ral's office would insist that Gilmore was not going to die because he wanted to, but because it was the lawful proper sentence for what he had done.

  That said, Hansen got cooperative. Boaz, he explained, would need a Utah attorney as sponsor before the State Supreme Court. It happened that the Deputy Attorney General, Mike Deamer, had a classmate named Tom Jones right in his office at this time. Tom Jones, called in, quickly agreed. It was all full of teamwork and smooth.

  Preparing his case that night, Dennis was trying to take into account the Utah Supreme Court he would appear before. They had a reputation of being to the right of Barry Goldwater. Those Justices were probably all Mormon, and just about the closest thing you could find on the Bench to a theocracy. Dennis decided he would be most effective, therefore, if he were a little emotional in his argument.

  While he hadn't done any criminal law since the spring of '74, he didn't feel lax. To the contrary, he felt highly competent. There was, after all, no need to do research here. Hansen, with his assistants, could handle five or six times the output he could muster—at this late hour. So he would try, Dennis decided, to give the Judges sympathy for Gilmore's desire to die with dignity.

  MR. HANSEN The State of Utah is not here to urge Mr. Gilmore's rights, the State is here to urge the rights of the people . . . I submit that the Stay of Execution is . . . contrary to the rights of the victim and his family, and contrary to the public interest as has been set forth by the laws of this state.

  JUSTICE HENRIOD Thank you. Which one of you gentlemen wants to address the court? You may proceed.

  MR. BOAZ Your Honor, the Supreme Court of the State of Utah . . .