The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  Schiller laughed. It would be a couple of weeks before he'd come to realize that Farrell had not said it altogether in jest, and was even annoyed that Golson, being the Playboy Interview Editor, might not be aware that Farrell had done one bang-up job for them years ago with Buckminster Fuller. Barry had come to the place in his life where he was counting his achievements in preference to scoffing at them.

  One reason for accepting Schiller's offer was that Barry Farrell didn't mind getting out of L.A. He was feeling some unaccustomed doubts about himself as a professional. Lately, he had been having trouble on deadlines, his wife was not well, and he was being sued in a major way by a publisher for nondelivery of manuscript. Being a man who had always taken his good reputation for granted, his life in Los Angeles of late produced the feeling that he was spinning his wheels. He actually felt grateful to Schiller. Somebody who trusted him to do a job.

  Barry had been doing a book about the Mustang Ranch in Nevada when the most extraordinary thing happened. This group of heavies and whores he had been writing about suddenly turned on each other. A killing took place. The dead man was the Argentine heavyweight Oscar Bonavena. A good friend of Barry's, just about the main character in his book, Ross Brymer, was arrested for the deed.

  That really knocked the wind out of Farrell's book. He couldn't go on with it. Felt the meaning of the word for the first time—crushed. Then Farrar, Straus & Giroux filed suit in Federal Court. The offer from Schiller felt like pure escape. To be able to labor long hours far away from his own concerns would be like an expense-paid vacation in Tahiti for him.

  Tamera was now living in Salt Lake with her brother, Cardell. Out of nowhere, Larry Schiller called one night and said he would like to talk to her. Maybe she would be able to work with him. Just wanted to discuss the possibilities. Could they meet?

  Tamera suggested he come to her brother's home. Cardell was an insurance salesman, and fourteen years older, and she followed his judgment greatly. Schiller had a pretty questionable reputation around the journalists she knew.

  After all, a lot of newspaper people were having to get their Gilmore stories however they could, and Schiller had just flown in with his checkbook and tied the whole thing up. Everybody was mad at that. Still, she agreed to see him. She thought she was an open person.

  Even if she had a bias, she wouldn't be content to live with that.

  Once Schiller began to talk, Tamera couldn't hold on to her dislike. Cardell, who was a shrewd businessman, was also swayed.

  Schiller just sat there and told them quietly, "I think you ought to know who I am." His career, as he recounted it, sounded pretty good.

  She could see Cardell liked the thorough way Schiller had handled the contracts so that there would be something substantial for Nicole's children, and the heirs of the victims. It didn't seem like he was just out to get the money.

  Once he finished talking about himself, he said to Tamera, "I'm not going to mislead you and suggest you're going to have a key part in writing a book or movie or anything like that." Still, there was a lot she could do for him, and a great deal he could offer her. If they could set up a working cooperation, he would let Tamera sit in as an assistant on many a meeting. She would meet a number of important people in journalism and television on a different basis from all her lunches and dinners with them heretofore. Those occasions might have been fun for her, but what he offered would be more substantial.

  She could be present when important decisions were hammered out in confrontation. She would get a dramatic inside view of how a big story is put together, and know a great deal more when she was done.

  Schiller liked her, although that hardly mattered. She was not exactly pretty, but she was attractive. Her features were a little too irregular to make her a beauty, but she was tall and had nice ash-blond hair and was full of energy, real clean-cut country pep. Wham! Pow!

  Stick her tongue in her cheek to show her confusion, or—Sock!—skew her lower jaw to the side to register embarrassment. With such a girl, Schiller knew his offer was better than catnip. It was these clean, slightly straitlaced young ladies with a wild ambitious career streak who could never resist opportunity.

  He needed, he said, a newspaper to be his source 24 hours a day. His eyes and ears in a strange city. He could tell Tamera that he had lived and worked in many a new town for a week or month, and before he was done, he sometimes knew more about what was going on in that region, be it Provo, or Tangiers, than the natives. Nobody could figure out how he did it, but he would tell her it was simple. He always tried to get a pipeline into a local newspaper. Would she be his pipeline to the Deseret News?

  He wanted, he assured her, a relationship that the newspaper would understand and profit from. He would supply them with pieces of information about Gilmore. In turn, she would feed him the local Salt Lake news plus what came in from Orem and Provo. Let him know what was—he used the local expression—coming down, what the Governor was up to, and the Attorney General's office. He wanted to have his finger on it.

  When she began to look worried, as if he were proposing a little too much, he went back to his main theme. "Tamera," he said, "even if you don't drink yourself, you're going to see big reporters drinking, and going after a story, and working on their interviews. It's all there to learn."

  What he did not mention was his private motive. He had to worry about Nicole. There would come a day when she would walk out of the hospital, and Schiller would go up to her. If, for any reason, she saw him as a Hollywood type waving a contract, then good relations with Tamera might be indispensable.

  Cardell left the room for a moment, and Larry nailed the relationship.

  He was proud of it afterward. Just a hunch, just a gamble on his instinct, but he knew there had to be some inside reason Tamera had gotten so close to Nicole. Something the two girls had in parallel. When they were alone, Schiller said, "I bet you made it with a con, and then he fucked you over."

  Tamera couldn't believe it. She stammered, "It wasn't that kind of relation. Wasn't sexual. But I was in love, and Nicole let me read Gary's letters because I told her about the wonderful letters I used to get from my friend."

  Schiller went back to L.A. on the night plane. He had a professional link with Sorensen on the Trib, and what might prove a real connection on the Deseret News. Barry Farrell, whom he called from the airport, said, yes, definitely, he would work with him. The pieces were coming together. Schiller enjoyed an airplane trip at such times.

  The first few weeks Nicole was in the ward, they couldn't get her to do a thing. She really told them off. It was absolutely against the rules to have people locked up, but there they were running this surveillance on her all the time. She let them know they were breaking their own rules. She was a bitch, verbally.

  Doctor Woods disgusted her. She would ask him innocent things, like, "Do I have to eat all you give me, every meal?" and he would look at her like you could lose your ass giving a solid reply. She thought he was a great pussy. This big, good-looking guy who would never commit himself.

  She was so angry at herself for failing in that suicide. Now she had really lost control of her life. They took care of her actions. Told her when she could go to the bathroom, watched her when she ate, just about gave her permission to close her eyes. In the daytime, they didn't allow you to rest your head on a chair. You couldn't go to sleep before eight at night. Here were all these patients, fuck-ups and convicts, kids in for some bump or hassle with the law, yet letting that be done to them. Even acted like they liked this business of living by their own rules.

  Every day the patients would sit down at a committee meeting—one came right after another—and discuss their rules. Rewrite them. Then they'd get into new hang-ups carrying out the new rules. It took Nicole a long time to realize that that was the way the place was supposed to work. A lot of them got to like writing and rewriting the rules. You could discuss the shit out of the changes, and play a lot of games with people. Fuck t
hem over and get points for it. Go back to the world knowing the ropes. It was a comedy. A real shift in the power trip, thought Nicole.

  She wasn't interested. Every time she would look out their second-story window, she would think of jumping through one day, making it to the road, making it out of town. But she knew she couldn't get free that way. They would really lock her in. Her best chance would be in her next Court appearance. She would have to convince them she wasn't suicidal.

  Nicole didn't try to decide where she was on that. If they let her out, maybe she would play it straight. Or, she might decide to start running down the Interstate until some big semi clapped her in the ass. She just wanted to get away. The place was too full of shit.

  Everybody squealing on everybody. "You broke the rules!" they were always screaming. Then, they would argue it up and down. Nicole tried not to get involved, but after a while, she couldn't help it. Those rules were so fucking stupid. You had to try to improve them.

  Then, she dug that there was one rule they were telling other patients but not her. Nobody was to mention Gary Gilmore's name. And no newspapers in the ward. If Nicole brought up Gary, nobody answered. People looked at her like she was kidding. Ha ha. Finally, they told her she was not allowed to say his name. She didn't care. It offended her to speak into the ears of these sheep.

  One time, Stein, her grandfather, came to visit, and to say something about Gary. Right away, the posse asked him to leave. She threw a fit. They put her on silent treatment. Nobody swore or got mad, just dead-ass posse staring at her. She would call them names until she could see them cringe, call them sheep and rats, say they were pussy-whipped. She told them she wouldn't go to committee meeting. They carried her over bodily. After a while, she went by herself. She didn't want to be subjected to physical embarrassment. One night they had a dance, and when she refused to join, they lifted her up again and carried her part of the way down the hall. She had to tell them to put her down. She would walk. Then, they started playing the song "King of the Road." She liked that so much, she even danced.

  The stuff going on in the meetings was incredible. She was no great brain, but compared to these asses, all totally involved in their own bullshit, she couldn't help opening her mouth to show them a better way. She had to laugh at how they were all working to become the number-one sheep. Of course, number-one sheep got to be the sheep-herder.

  God, they could draw maps on how to be an asshole. If you left a pack of cigarettes sitting around and somebody stole a couple, that started tension. Who did it? Can I trust you? So they would vote that you couldn't carry your own cigarettes any more. Somebody else had to dish them out. Like you could only get one on the hour, every hour.

  Nicole developed this ability to sit through a meeting and not hear a word. She had to. When she took a bath, three girls stayed in the room to watch her.

  Must have been afraid she'd go down the drain. When she talked to Woods, she tried to run a line on him about all the nice things she was going to do when she got out. Some of it was real, some was made-up, but she would talk about getting away from Utah or going to school. She wanted, she told him, to take real care of Sunny and Jeremy. She put on such a good act, that after a while, it wasn't that she wanted to live exactly, it was that she wasn't so sure she wanted to die. You couldn't keep being enthusiastic about all these groovy things you were going to do when you got out, and not begin to wonder a little. Way inside, the enthusiasm didn't always feel completely phony.

  She tried to make Woods believe she was ready to live without Gary. She never once said it without also saying to herself, "I'm putting the man on." Yet, she could also hear herself saying, "Keep it up. You'll believe it, too."

  They had this rule you couldn't sleep without a nightgown. She hated that. Always liked to sleep with nothing on. One night, she slipped her nightgown off under the covers. Damn if three girls didn't come down on her to put it back. All through the night, there'd be a girl taking her turn in a chair to keep a watch on Nicole.

  She felt as if slowly, real slow, but real sure, they were smothering her soul. Sometimes it would come over her right in a meeting.

  She would be sitting in a line of girls, listening to them bitch and holler and would put her head on her knees and never even look up, once, never react to anything going on. Just sit through a meeting with her head on her knees crying away. Nobody paid any attention. There was always one girl or another off like that, Goddamnedest government she ever saw, half the kids crying, and the others half passing laws or standing up to make speeches full of bullshit. A lot of them wouldn't even remember what they started to say. They'd argue about how you got the floor in the first place, when, in fact, they were sitting on the floor already. And they'd rat on each other. One girl would say, "You were having eye language with Billy," and the other would say, "I wasn't." "Fuck you, you were."

  Nicole wanted to say, "You goddamned idiots, I don't care what any of you do. You're all so dumb you think I'm sick. It doesn't matter. Even if you think I'm crazy, this is the way I want to be. I don't want to change." Then, she would realize she was never going to hear Gary's voice again.

  Chapter 17

  I AM THE LAND LORD HERE

  Gibbs wrote to Gary and said he was coming up for trial around the twentieth of December. He figured he'd be released, and wanted to know if there was anything Gary wanted done before he left the state, because he wouldn't be hanging around. He was going, he wrote, to show Utah what Mae West had showed Tennessee. Her ass, as she was leaving.

  On December 11th, Big Jake brought Gibbs out to the front desk where an older fellow with a mustache was waiting. He walked with a cane and carried a briefcase. This gentleman introduced himself as Gary's uncle, Vern Damico, and said Gary had asked him to deliver a token of his friendship. Then he opened his briefcase and handed over a check made out by a local law firm for two thousand bucks.

  Gibbs asked if Gary's mother was financially taken care of, and when Mr. Damico said she was, they shook hands. Gibbs introduced Mr. Damico to Big Jake, and said here was the only jailer Gary had any respect for. Mr. Damico replied, "Yes, Gary has spoken well of you, Big Jake." Damico then said he had some other appointments to keep, wished him good luck and left. Big Jake said, "We should have asked him if Gary would invite me to the execution."

  A couple of guards had been standing in the doorway and they were gawking with envy. Gibbs laughed and made a call to Salt Lake, and had a friend come down for the check and put it in the bank.

  That evening, Gibbs wrote to Gary again, thanked him for the money, and mentioned how Maximum was filled now, six prisoners altogether, including Powers. Gary answered, "If I were there, we'd keep all of them lying on their bunks like little church mice and we'd put Powers in charge of licking out the Open Pit Sulphur Mine with his tongue." In the letter he also said he was still on the hunger strike and wasn't going to eat "until they let me talk to my sweet lady Nicole."

  "I've been trying," Gary wrote, "to keep my thoughts and my mood pretty constant, but lately I've been growing increasingly irritated and angry. I don't like the idea they got Nicole down there brainwashing her."

  "Just as a matter of my personal curiosity," Moody said, "is there any way you will stop this hunger strike other than the phone call to Nicole?"

  "Nothing," said Gary, "that's it." He paused to indicate that he knew the price of the remark. "I'm awful goddamned hungry, man," he whispered over the phone.

  "I admire you for your courage," said Moody.

  "It," said Gilmore, "is just goddamned stubbornness."

  "Not very many guys," Moody told him, "have the strength of their convictions like you do."

  "I spent eighteen straight months in the hole one time," said Gilmore. "I don't think this even compares."

  Ron felt that Gary was putting on a show of strength. Each day, he made a point of going through his exercises, and he would do a head-stand on a chair to show he wasn't suffering. He was, however, not only losin
g a considerable amount of weight, but it seemed lately to have an effect on his thinking. He would stumble on words. His cheeks started to sink in. For the first time, Ron became conscious of Gary's false teeth. His loss of weight seemed to change their placement on his gums, and he said everything slowly and deliberately, as if working around a marble in his mouth, sort of a tongue-tied orator.

  At this point, Gary told Vern he definitely wanted Ida and him to go visit his mother. Bring her the thousand dollars. Vern talked to Schiller, who latched on immediately. Bessie, once she got talking to Vern, might allow an interview.

  So Moody drew up the papers. Schiller said, "I'll pay for the airplane fare, the phone calls, and put a thousand dollars on the top for her release. If you need more, just call." Vern said, "I think I'll need more. Come on, Schiller, you know you can give it to Gary's mother." And Larry knew he would, but a thousand might be right for starters.

  So Vern and Ida took the plane from Salt Lake to Portland, rented a little Pinto hatchback, found the trailer park on McLaughlin Boulevard, and knocked on Bessie's door.

  At first, it looked like they wouldn't get in. They stood on a little half porch for the longest time with no answer. It was cold, and Vern's leg was aching again from the operation. Bessie's first words were, "Go away. I can't let you in. I'm not presentable."

  They had to talk pretty loud to be heard through the door. Finally they identified themselves. Said they'd come clear from Provo. Had things to talk over. Things Gary wanted to tell. Finally Bessie let them in.