The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  So she wrote a letter to Gilmore. She told him that she regretted the discomfort that the ACLU was causing him and the terrible uncertainty.

  She wished she had the opportunity to talk to him directly, and explain what they were doing. She knew his life was being made more difficult by her. She wanted to tell him why she thought it had to be done. She wished they could cooperate, instead of finding themselves on different sides.

  She thought that if she could speak to Gary Gilmore, she would say that she was not personally out of sympathy with his wish to commit suicide. She could see how confronting life at Utah State Prison might warrant taking one's own life, and he had a right to decide whether he was going to live or die. But she did feel the State had no business participating. Capital punishment was not only wrong, but his execution would touch off others, for it would demystify the taking of life by the State. The real horror was people lining up to blow somebody away with a lack of passion, a methodical, calculated turning of the machinery of the State against the individual.

  Why come to terms with it? That was what she wanted to say.

  As lawyers, Moody and Stanger were able to beat the no-visitor law, and they went to see Gary late on Christmas afternoon.

  GILMORE Shirley Pedler wrote me a personal letter. What does she look like anyway?

  STANGER She's a slight, young woman, about thirty, not bad looking. I've never seen her in person. I've only seen her on TV. She wears a suit with pants.

  GILMORE I don't know what we can do to make the ACLU butt out. The Supreme Court said they're not gonna rehear it. What else can they do? Go to the United Nations? . . .

  Shirley Pedler had Christmas dinner at her parents' house. They were pretty conservative people, and her father worked for the State, but never, until this meal, had they had a knock-down drag-out about capital punishment. Today, however, her brother started to attack her on the ACLU position, and Shirley had to defend it. Her brother kept saying, "What about the victims and the families?"

  It escalated. Shirley had been going in a different direction from her family anyway, but the discussion did ruin the dinner and she felt bad about that. None of them was able to get really comfortable after that.

  GILMORE Would you like to hear a poem?

  STANGER Sure.

  GILMORE I'll give you a little preamble to it. You know prisons are noisy places. And I talked about that guard blowing his nose for five minutes. And this morning he carried on a two-hour conversation, and I finally asked him to shut up. This poem is in the book that I wrote for Nicole. This is the preamble: I get irritable at the noise I have to listen to, toilets flushing, water pipes jarring, stupid conversations, screened conversation Now here's the poem:

  Dark thots of mayhem on a cold steel nite, when the little noises won't let you sleep.

  Dark thots of mayhem, murder and gore.

  A bore. Too few dark debts are ever paid.

  A fool down the way laughs at the loss of day, another sighs and another cries at the lies of their lives.

  Dark thots of mayhem murder and gore, too few dark debts are ever paid

  More owed.

  I wrote that poem in '74 listening to noise I didn't want to hear. I like it quiet. I would love an absence of sound so profound I could hear my blood. I guess that's one of the things I've always hated worst about prison, the noise, listening to motherfuckers barf and cough, and listening to frustration. On the seventeenth of January I hope to hear my last harsh noise.

  STANGER Hum, it's a good poem.

  Chapter 21

  THE OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS

  Julie Jacoby had a good opinion of Shirley Pedler and thought her very attractive with that long thin build and her beautiful long hands.

  The strain of the Gilmore situation, however, was really making Shirley lose too much weight. She had been a pretty intense woman to begin with, but after these last weeks, she was beginning to resemble a cigarette.

  Although Shirley was twenty-four years younger, Julie Jacoby thought they were a lot alike. They would both rather be reclusive, yet were always in the middle of political activity. So Julie was not surprised when Shirley, during Christmas week, asked her to aid in the formation of the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

  Of course Julie had not been doing a great deal in the year since she and her husband moved from Chicago to Utah. It was nothing like the Days of Rage in Chicago in the summer of 1968 when people were beaten by the police. That was when, in her own mind, she moved on from being little more than just another society lady from the North Shore who came down to United Charities twice a week to spend an afternoon sympathizing with the mothers of black children who came into the office in various states of coma from eating lead paint that had peeled off the walls. Some of those society ladies used to appear for work wearing diamond rings, and Julie had spent time trying to get the idea across that these ladies ought not to carry more wealth on their finger than the person in need across the desk could make in a year.

  Her husband was an executive and Julie would say that he seemed never to have recovered from a shock in the womb that left him a deep-dyed forever Republican. Julie, Phi Beta in medieval history from the University of Michigan, had gone to Chicago to seek her fortune, and found it in the good German fellow she married, for he rose in the ranks of his corporation while Julie brought up their children and became—her first clue to future shifts—a lapsed Episcopalian. She might have done no more than join the League of Women Voters, read the National Observer, the New York Review of Books and I. F. Stone, but the Days of Rage on Michigan Boulevard shook her to the roots. She felt radicalized. After Attica traumatized.

  She thought Rockefeller was shooting the fish in the barrel that day.

  She worked with the Alliance to End Repression.

  Then the company moved her husband to Utah. Out in Salt Lake, the ACLU was the only game in town. Julie wanted to start another Alliance to End Repression, but the energy was no longer there. Utah depressed her. She felt that she and her husband were living in a deteriorated relationship, and her young son, ripped from his native soil at the age of twelve, was not happy. It just about took Julie down. She became so occupied with her son's problems that she felt defanged on social issues.

  She thought she was in an extremely right-wing place. The Church and State were deeply entangled. Julie went to visit the opening of the Legislature and here was this trio of sour-faced old men sitting up front. They did the opening prayer. She was there that day to testify against capital punishment, and the chairman of the committee, a Mormon, said that as long as he had to listen to the Episcopalian point of view, he would like to read something to close the meeting, and opened a red-bound book and quoted Brigham Young.

  Those who shed blood must pay in blood. It chilled her. The Church was the State. She would have liked to tell that chairman, we live in a world of fallible people where prosecutors decide whether the charge is second- or first-degree murder and nobody knows who or what is influencing the prosecutor. They don't have the right to take an individual's life under the protective coloration of the law.

  She might have a problem with her child, and her marriage was dead, and she loved the pleasures of seclusion, and the nourishments of reading. God, she loved to read the way others would insist on three meals a day, but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief—at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac.

  So she went to the meeting for a Coalition Against the Death Penalty and twenty people showed up to see what they could do about convincing Gary Gilmore that he was 100 percent wrong in wanting the State t
o shuffle him off this mortal coil. The Coalition would seek to get the idea across that the State should not be able to kill anybody. Gilmore was a sensitive artist, but he was also, thought Julie Jacoby, acting like a very selfish man.

  Shirley Pedler had been intending to organize the meeting herself, but came down with a terrific case of semi-pneumonia, so Julie discovered a fellow named Bill Hoyle from the Socialist Workers' Party had been handed the bill. He was there, he said, to do the legwork. There was a pastor from the United Church of Christ, the Reverend Donald Proctor, and the Reverend John P. Adams from the United Methodist Church who was on the Board of the National Coalition Against Capital Punishment. They discussed what sort of action they should take.

  Don Proctor had ideas that Julie thought were something Alinsky-esque. He wanted a highly visible rally, a get-together, say, in the center of a busy shopping mall on a Saturday.

  No one was comfortable with that. For one thing, you had to get permission to go on private property. They finally decided to have a mass meeting in a hall prior to January 17, and then a vigil on the prison grounds all through the night before the execution. More ministers might turn out then. Right now was Christmas week, a time of heavy business for reverends.

  In the meantime, they had $100 in working funds contributed by the Society of Friends. Bill Hoyle said he'd get some flyers printed and they could count on buttons from the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York. The buttons would say, "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?"

  Back in the motel, Gibbs was eating codeine like candy, but he was careful to take Oral Varidase only as prescribed. Day after Christmas, he called his mother and she told him to keep his leg elevated and put a heating pad on it. She'd been a registered nurse for thirty-five years. She also told him to be careful shaving. If he was even to nick himself, he might not, because of the Oral Varidase, be able to get the bleeding to stop.

  Gibbs also called Halterman. Ken's first words were, "If it wasn't you, Gibbs, I wouldn't believe it." Then he said, "Know anybody can get in more jams?" That's all Gibbs needed to cheer himself up.

  He phoned Owl Taxi for cigarettes, whiskey, Cokes, ice and some canned tomato and mushroom soup, which he figured to use on the little courtesy coffeepot heater in the room. Until he got his upper plate fixed, he would have to live on soup. Then he called the Highway Patrol to see who had brought his car in, and asked the kid who'd done the job to look in the front seat for the other half of his teeth. An hour or so later, the fellow came to the room with the missing piece. Since the car was totaled, he wondered if Gibbs would consider selling the engine. Could pay around $25 a month. The boy had just gotten married and didn't have much money. Gibbs said, "Take it from me as a late wedding present."

  After a couple days of tomato and mushroom soup, Gibbs asked the lady who ran the motel if she knew of a restaurant that offered take-home food. Right offhand, she didn't, but asked what he would like. When he said soft-boiled eggs, toast and milk, she brought it to his room and he paid her $5. She told him two would be sufficient, but he insisted on five. She was one of the most agreeable people he ever met in his thirty-one years of life.

  The following day he called a florist shop in Butte and asked the saleswoman to have flowers delivered. Then he asked her to write on the card, "To the nicest lady in the world" and please sign it Lance LeBaron. He explained he did not know her name, but sure did know how well she had treated him. The woman at the florist shop not only agreed she was nice but said the name was Irene Snell, and the flowers were delivered an hour or so later.

  From then on, every night, Mrs. Snell brought his meals. After he got his teeth fixed, she would tell him what she herself was having for dinner. He ended up eating everything from spaghetti to steaks and always had to argue with her on the price. In the mean time, the doctor came by to check his leg, refill his prescription and remove the stitches from his forehead.

  Slowly, his cash was going down, but Gibbs didn't think about it.

  He had never been able to manage money anyway. Between $25 and $60 a day was being spent in long-distance phone calls, and he made a point to pay the motel bill each morning. It was hard not to feel sorry for himself. Each night he'd get drunk, and then he'd want to cry on someone's shoulder. That was hell at long distance. One old girl friend he almost asked to fly up to stay with him, but decided he wouldn't. Then he called another old girl friend. Almost did the same thing. But he couldn't think of a girl who might not disclose to the wrong people where he was and, worse, what condition he was in.

  He made a point to tell everybody he called that he was lying in bed with a nine millimeter Browning Automatic right next to him, and thirteen good reasons in the clip why nobody, unless invited, better come through his door. When he mentioned this to Halterman, Ken said, "For somebody who's trying to hide, you sure talk your butt off."

  Even the operators in Butte started using his name. As soon as he'd ask for Salt Lake, they would answer, "How are you, Mr. LeBaron? It's room three at the Mile High, is it not?" He had left Utah with $1,370 and was now down to $500.

  Lying in bed, he would sometimes go out of his head a little and imagine what it would be like when he went to the execution. Would he get to go up and talk in person? If they let him, he would say, "Gilmore, remember how you once told me you never misjudged a person who has done time? Well, let me tell you what I do for a living." Then he would ponder whether he really would say it, assuming in his mind, somehow, that Schiller had never told anybody, which, of course, he had. "Gary," Gibbs would say, looking him in the eye, "you have met your match. Your sixth sense about good convicts has served you wrong in regards to me. I am the one person who has been able to fool, deceive and turn the tables on you, Gary Gilmore."

  Then it would all come down on him again, his pain, his situation, his fucking life, and he would say to himself, "Gary, that ain't the speech I'd make. I would say, 'Goddamn you, you got more guts than any son of a bitch I ever knew. I just wish I had as many balls as you. Hell, fellow, A man knows a man whenever they meet,' " and he would blink back his sadness, for it was a sentence Gary had written to him in a recent letter that could just as well have been received years ago.

  Half the value of Schiller's vacation was quickly blown. He had brought Stephie out to meet his brother and sister-in-law and it was a social thing, and she was spending all her time with them, and where was he? On the phone. What headaches.

  The lawyers for Max Jensen's insurance company had filed a Wrongful Death suit for recovery of $40,000 from Gary Gilmore's estate, and as a courtesy to Colleen Jensen, had hooked on a million-dollar suit for her. Now, while Schiller was trying to go belly-up to the sun, damn if the insurance lawyers didn't get a Court order that Gary had to give a deposition. When Schiller found out about it, he hit the fucking ceiling. He was stuck to the phone. Said to Moody, "Did you agree? You didn't fight it? What do you mean you didn't?"

  He did not enjoy shrieking at Moody because it was highly nonproductive. Moody was too stubborn for that. Just sat behind his glasses. A real poker player. Yet Schiller couldn't help himself. He was climbing the walls and bouncing.

  "What are you upset about?" asked Bob Moody. "What's the big thing about a deposition?"

  Schiller almost said, "Are you out of your mind?" He did say, "Don't you understand? The Enquirer can make a goddamned deal with those lawyers, go in for three hours, and pick up Gary's whole life story. Even if they can't get any of their own reporters in, they can coach one of the attorneys to pump Gary." It was awful. They had a right to start the deposition with where-were-you-born, then go into Gilmore's criminal record. "The whole story," shrieked Schiller, "can be pulled out in one session."

  Moody said, "We can't stop it."

  "Bullshit," said Schiller. "I want you to go right into Court. If you can't block the deposition, at least file a motion that it's got to be put in bond." He smacked his fist against the night table, feeling a whol
e kinship with the notion of bond. "The tapes from that meeting," he said, "have got to be sealed right at the jail, and the Court has to give an order that they're not to be transcribed for so many months, blah blah, you understand what I mean, et cetera." Stephie was ready to kill him. Here it was supposed to be a vacation, and he was living on the phone. "Is this what it's going to be like when we get married?" she cried out. Was she just another woman? Was she a business deal? Schiller waved her off. Over the wire, he was practically writing out the motion. What a relief when he learned a couple of days later that the Judge agreed to seal the stuff in wax, literally, until March.

  There, in the balmy air of Hawaii, Schiller began to breathe. The Enquirer could still try to get those insurance lawyers to take notes, but he didn't worry about that. Now that there was a Court order invoking secrecy, a lawyer could be disbarred for making such a deal.

  Besides, no local Mormon would fight a Judge's order. It had been close. A possible catastrophe averted.

  Yet when the lawyers went to the prison next day to take the deposition, they had to wait six hours, and Gary never showed. It seemed his food had come on a paper plate, and he threw a tantrum, and refused to leave his cell. Double insurance.

  From Hawaii, Schiller was making phone calls all over the world to set up the sale of the letters so they couldn't be traced to him. This all involved dealing with the right editor. It was only every few years when he had a particularly big offering, that he would contact the major foreign magazines. He knew, therefore, they wouldn't cross him. He wasn't obliged to be on the phone with them tomorrow making still another deal. He was not an agent who had ten projects moving at once with the same people, and so could say, "All right, I'll give you this concession, if you give me that." Under such conditions, each side could afford to double-cross the other occasionally. Ten mild double-crosses, say, in a hundred deals. But doing custom work, as he did, custom jobs, editors were hardly going to trick him. They'd never have another opportunity to bid on his work.