Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [369]
The subtlety of the self-pity was cloying. Still, Farrell was loving the job even more than expected. One twenty-hour day after another, sure enough, but what absorption! What delight to be altogether out of himself. By God, Barry thought, I have all the passions of an archivist. I'm proprietary about the material.
Once in a while, he even laughed. One night when he and Larry were so tense from overwork that they could hardly look at one another, a tape came in from Gilmore that got them laughing so hard they almost slid off their chairs. It had to be the tension. Yet for one glorious minute, Gilmore was as funny to Farrell as Bob Hope on a good night, same maniacal see-through X-ray eye, same hatred of horseshit. God, sometimes he saw into the bottom of the pot, thought Farrell.
GILMORE Oh, hey, man, I got something that'll make a mint. Get aholda John Cameron Swazey right now, and get a Timex wristwatch here. And have John Cameron Swazey out there after I fall over, he can be wearing a stethoscope, he can put it on my heart and say, "Well, that stopped," and then he can put the stethoscope on the Timex and say, "She's still running, folks."
Nonetheless, it offended Farrell to be so hooked. He often thought that if less attention had been paid to Gilmore he might have changed his mind and looked to avoid his execution. Now Gary was trapped in fame, and it gave him a crazy strength. Of course, one Barry Farrell had become an integral part of this machine that was making it impossible for Gilmore to take an appeal. Hardly a flattering light on yourself. You could try to say, "I'm not the locomotive, only one of the cars, and in my car, the best, most sensitive, thinking is being done about the situation. Therefore, my moral responsibility is to stay with it. If I leave," Farrell told himself, "Gilmore is abandoned to the likes of 'Good Morning America.' "
Nonetheless, in the quiet of 2 A.M., Barry would recall how his New West piece described Larry Schiller as a carrion bird. Now he had to wonder if Barry Farrell was not the blackest wing in journalism.
Somebody was always dying in his stories. Oscar Bonavena getting killed, Bobby Hall, young blond girls getting offed on highways in California. One cult slaying or another. He even had the reputation of being good at it. His telephone number leaped to the mind of various editors. Barry Farrell, crime reporter, with an inner life exasperatingly Catholic. Led his life out of his financial and emotional exigencies, took the jobs his bills and his battered psyche required him to take, but somehow his assignments always led him into some new great moral complexity. Got into his writing like a haze.
Yet there was one aspect of the interviews he did not question.
There was something marvelous about the energy Gilmore had to give. Cline Campbell stopped by at the motel to say hello, and remarked to Farrell, "Your work is a godsend. This is Gary's one chance to express himself." Looking at the daily bits and pieces of produce, Farrell would think, Yes, you could see Gilmore's attempt to form a coherent philosophy in relation to some incredibly tangled ethical matters.
MOODY What are some of the things you could never do?
GILMORE Oh, I couldn't snitch on anybody. I couldn't rat on anybody. I don't think I could torture anybody.
MOODY Isn't forcing somebody to lie down on the floor and shooting him in the back of the head torture?
GILMORE I'd say it was a very short torture.
MOODY But how could any crime be worse than taking a person's life?
GILMORE Well, you could alter somebody's life so that the quality it wouldn't be what it could've been. I mean, you could torture 'em, you could blind 'em, you could maim 'em, you could cripple