Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [370]
STANGER Then there are crimes that you consider worse than murder?
GILMORE Well, Jesus, I don't know, there's all kinds of crimes, you know . . . what some governments do to their people, you know? Forms of brainwash in some countries . . . I think some forms of behavior modification, like, ah, you know, the irreversible forms, like lobotomies, and ah, you know, Prolixin-I won't say they're worse than murder, but man, you gotta give it some thought . . . You don't interfere with somebody's life. You let people meet their own fate.
STANGER Didn't you interfere with Jensen's and, ah, Bushnell's lives?
GILMORE Yes.
STANGER You think you had any right to do that?
GILMORE No. (sighs)
MOODY If you really believe that your soul is full of evil, and if you really wish to atone, why haven't you attempted . . . some expression of remorse?
GILMORE I don't believe my soul is that full of evil.
MOODY Do you think it's filled with any?
GILMORE More evil than yours, or Rod's, or, uh, a lot of people's. I think I'm further from God than you are, and I would like to come closer.
MOODY Do you think expressing remorse is mushy?
GILMORE I'm afraid the newspapers would interpret it in a mushy light.
Campbell might be right. With all his poses, Gary was still rising to the interview so well it was frustrating on occasion not to be able to conduct the interviews oneself.
Yet Farrell was just as glad it couldn't happen. He was saved thereby from having to muster that twinkle of the eye at which he had become so reassuring. Or that firm handshake which said, "I'm here to listen to you, man to man, buddy to buddy." All those things interviewers did, those up-front sympathies, those gut-grinder empathies. This way, there was no quickly-arrived-at brotherhood to betray.
He could sit at the typewriter and compose his questions, Moody and Stanger would truck them out, Debbie and Lucinda would type the tapes, and he could study it long enough to write new questions.
He and Gary were immunized from one another. No need to twist his face full of instant humanity in order to keep Gilmore talking.
Even more important, he would not have to run the risk of getting too friendly with Gary and so forgetting that some basic pieces might be missing in Gilmore, that he, Barry Farrell, as a brother of Max Jensen, ought not to forgive for too little. Yes, it was better this way.
Still, the tapes were endlessly irritating. Barry was developing quite a dislike for the lawyers. It was too cruel a demand on his nervous system not to know whether a serious question was going to be presented properly, or if Moody, or particularly Stanger, would giggle his ass off. To Farrell, straining to listen at the end of a tape, the lawyers seemed too cautious when they were not too flighty. Some of those Sisters at the Catholic school in Portland, Gilmore would confide to the lawyers, gave us real whippings. "They used to go insane with frustration," Gary said, "trying to make me conform. I got beat by nuns more than once. It wasn't like when they disciplined other children there. My father finally took me out of the school." Farrell was up on tiptoe for the development of this theme. The key to every violent criminal could be found in the file of his childhood beatings, but Gilmore claimed his mother never touched him, and his father never bothered to. So here, at last, might be the beginning of some nitty-gritty. Stanger, however, chose to say, "Oh, gee, those nuns always seemed so nice in the movies." Gilmore answered, "Yeah. In the movies." Stanger cackled.
To Farrell's ears