Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [318]
Having been born in Butte, Ron could get a quick laugh by saying, "Leave out the 'e' and you got it spelled." His two older brothers, he told Gary, used to sell newspapers over his near-dead body. Ron would start hawking on the best corner, and quick enough, a couple of bigger newsboys would jump him. As they did, his brothers would jump them, and get the corner for a while.
Back in the '40s, feeling cold and dirty in the winter, he'd be tired from carrying papers around. He'd go to bars and those old gals drinking would buy all he had left out of sympathy. Greatest practice for the law was learning to make those faces that draw sympathy.
Then the family moved to Oregon and there were hardly any Mormons in the town. The church was above a laundry one time. He met people who believed Mormons had horns because they kept more than one wife. Stanger was just a kid but he would say, "I'm all for it." In fact, his grandfather had been a polygamist. When Stanger first came to BYU, they asked in assembly how many of the kids had polygamous ancestors. Near everybody stood up. Of course, those polygamist families were not particularly happy, thought Ron. "You gave so and so a baby," one wife would yell "and you ain't given me one." If you came from a second family, like his dad did, you knew the difference between first and second. Hell, it was hard enough to keep one wife happy.
Gary asked him to go on. Thought all this was fascinating.
Ron said he was the first member of his family ever to go to college, and hardly knew why he picked BYU unless it was to be in a place where Mormons were the accustomed thing. He hadn't been to school more than a few days when this gal who was blond and cute said something about Ernie Wilkinson. Ron opened his big mouth and said, "Who is that?" Thought Ernie was her boy friend. How was he supposed to know Wilkinson was the President of the University.
The gal got so sarcastic Ron walked away. "There," he said to his friends, "is one girl I could never go out with." Now they'd been married twenty-two years, and had quite a family. Five kids, all in adolescence at once, all adopted.
When Ron and Viva couldn't have children, they waited five years, then put in an application through the Church, and had to wait another two years to get their first adoption. It took so long they already had a bunch of other applications out, and within a year three more children were in the house.. Four kids under four years of age.
They were going to hold out for a girl on the fifth, but heard about an infant they could get immediately from a sister agency in Oregon.
Ron and Viva took all four and jumped on a plane to Portland to pick up the new little one.
Once aboard, they distributed children to everybody. Said to strangers, "Here, we got too many, would you take one?" On the way back, they had a tyke in the lead, then the twins, barely walking, Ron next, holding the next-to-littlest one, and Viva coming up behind with one more baby. Two old ladies came over and said, "We need to ask a question. Are you Mormons?" When they nodded, the old ladies said, "We could tell. It's such a big family." Later, on the plane, Viva remarked, "Wouldn't it have been funny if you told them we were both sterile?"
He and Gary laughed a long time over that one.
Chapter 16
BRIDGE TO THE NUTHOUSE
Schiller got an advance copy of Barry Farrell's article in New West.
It was called "Merchandising Gary Gilmore's Dance of Death" which sounded bad, and the piece covered Gilmore's negotiations with Boaz, Susskind, and Schiller. To Schiller's satisfaction, the parts on himself, while plus and minus, were generally okay.
Uncle Vern seemed