Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [356]
STANGER Have you ever been any good as a prison politician?
GILMORE In the last period when I was in Oregon I got off into a revolutionary bag a little bit, and then I just seen them revolutionaries ain't gonna revolution shit, so I fell out of that. (laughing)
STANGER Okay. You spent more than four years in the hole. Is this because you choose to do it the hard way? Or, because your acts are beyond your control?
GILMORE (laughing).. I gotta pick A, or B now, huh? (laughing)
STANGER Multiple choice . . . (laughing)
GILMORE Man, I'm just a fuck-up.
Moody and Stanger might not have been overworking the mine, but they were sure curious about sales. As soon as Schiller came back from Hawaii they began to question him about the overseas sales.
Schiller had to give them details on deals before they were even discussed.
His remark at lunch that he could sell the letters, and they would never know, had come home to him. They paid a lot of attention to the prospect of money coming in. He hoped it might fire them up to do better interviews, but it only made them feel that they were doing the work for everybody else. They even started to claim that the interviews were not part of their original arrangement, and they should get additional compensation. He could tell it would be an ongoing discussion.
About the way it went. Certain exchanges drove Farrell up the wall In the interview on December 20, there had been a clue in the back-and-forth:
INTERVIEWER Your sense of the inevitability and the rightness of your fate suggests that the killings were a long time coming. Had you fantasized yourself in the killer's role long before it became a reality? (pause) It's a good heady question, isn't it? (laughter)
GILMORE Yeah, it is. I wonder if I could go take a hit 'n' miss? (laughter) That's rhyme in Cockney for "piss."
INTERVIEWER Sounds good. Let's do it.
GILMORE And come back and answer that one. I'll give that some thought.
INTERVIEWER Okay.
GILMORE It's rather religious.
Then Gary had come back with his long and half-satisfactory account of killing Jensen. That was last week. It proved what Farrell had expected.
Secretly, Gilmore did like literary questions and highly formulated approaches. It dignified his situation. Here, despite the lawyer's mockery of the question, he had still worked to find some kind of answer. But such willingness to reply would not bear up if the lawyer kept responding with nothing but jokes. It was like people making quips around the bed of a man dying of cancer.
The problem, Schiller decided, was that vis-a-vis Gary, the lawyers were feeling stronger all the time. They had made a point of letting him know that while he was sunning in Hawaii, they had been out at the jail on Christmas Day. They had also been out New Year's Day. And every day in between. That Gary had sure been lonely. The lawyers informed Schiller as if he had been absent for years. There was no question Gary looked forward to the visits they would make. It enabled him to leave his cell and go to the booth just off the visitors' room. Even after a couple of hours of conversation, they had no more than to hang up the phone and start to leave, when they would hear a tap on the window. Gilmore was pulling them back. He wanted to inquire about their children. He would give advice. When they do something wrong, punish them. But keep telling them you love them.
Those daily sessions had given the lawyers such concern for Gary's daily situation, Schiller decided, that they were not seeing the big job. It had become natural for them to downgrade it.
5
Schiller's most worrisome problem on returning, however, was with Gary. First, he had to tell him about the National Enquirer.
That piece would be out in a few days. From Hawaii, he instructed the lawyers to explain to Gilmore that he had sold a few rights to the Enquirer because they were going to do a story on Gilmore anyway,