Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [391]
Of the two girls in the office Debbie was a former Playboy Bunny, a small good-looking redhead who gave you a lift with her personality and did her work well. The other, Lucinda Smith, was an absolute beauty, Barry decided, dark hair, fabulous eyes, the sweetest voice, one of those intimate, purring, matter-of-fact California voices. Barry liked having her there. She was emotional and cried easily, and there was so much to cry about in the last week that he thought she was indispensable to the office. A chorus, nay, a brook of clear feeling to bring a breath of tenderness to the plasticoid abyss of their motel.
God, she wasn't that many years out of Corvallis run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Lucinda had been the only Presbyterian there. Her father, Barry learned, used to be head writer and director for Groucho Marx, and she had grown up in Studio City, just as secluded as you could get in the San Fernando Valley, had had an honest-to-God coming-out party, and gone to UCLA. Perfect Southern California pedigree. Now she was listening to Gary Gilmore say fuck, piss, shit.
She had gotten her job through an exclusive employment agency run by two girls. Lucinda had been an English major, and when Schiller called, the agent thought of her immediately, told her it would be an interesting experience. While Lucinda hadn't met Mr. Schiller before the job began, she did have a talk with his secretary in Los Angeles, and was told that if she didn't cut the mustard, she'd be sent home immediately. It gave her the feeling of a boss who laid down the law before they even met. That was stimulating. They would treat her on her merits, rather than her social standing.
Since the other girl had gone in a day ahead of her, she took the plane from Los Angeles by herself. When she got to the Orem TraveLodge, Mr. Schiller was very polite, and said, "Do you want to rest for a while?" She said, "No, I'll get started." Hardly put her bags down before she began to transcribe tapes, one after another. That tempo would increase. Lucinda started at twelve hours a day, and was close to working around the clock by the weekend. She didn't really want to sleep. There was kind of an eerie feeling over the whole thing. She felt better being with Larry and Barry and Debbie. Alone in her room, it would start to come over her what was going on.
On Saturday night, she did take a break and turned on the TV. There was "Saturday Night Live." They had a parody of Gary Gilmore.
The cast was putting makeup on an actor playing the convict and the director kept saying, "A little more light over here, a little more eye shadow." They were getting him ready to be shot for the camera. Very sarcastic. Kept putting on the makeup. She never thought television would be this weird. She had always thought "existential" was an odd word, but it now was so bleak and cold outside, just a little bit of eternal snow on the ground, and she felt as if no one had ever gone out of this motel with these Xerox machines, and the typewriters.
7
Barry Farrell was studying Gary's old letters to Nicole. Reading one of them, he nearly groaned. It was too late in the day to question Gilmore about this, not too late, that is, to ask the question-God, they had asked him everything-but it was certainly too late to get an answer that would reveal anything. They should have prepared the ground over many weeks.
"I was in the State Hospital in Oregon," Gary had written, "trying to beat an armed-robbery beef and this 13-year-old boy came 'cause he couldn't get along at home. He was really pretty, like a girl, but I never gave him much thought until it became apparent that he really liked me. I was 23 then. I'd be sitting down and he would come up and sit beside me and put his arm around me. It was just natural to him, a show of friendship. One time he came up in the locker room and asked if he could read this Playboy I had. I said sure, for a kiss. Man, he was dumbfounded! His eyes got big as silver dollars