Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [392]
Barry valued it greatly, that kiss. Gilmore was confesing. It struck him as the most moral moment in the letters. Finally Gilmore was admitting to something that had been on his mind all along, something which had gone right through all his evasions with sex-all that transparent discomfort with sexual material. Yet here, in this little confession, it was lifted. He could say it. What a sweet kiss. A nice moment.
Farrell didn't think it was a matter of homosexuality as such. He took it for granted that Gilmore, like the majority of men, Farrell knew, who lived their lives in prison, had been one sort or another of situational homosexual. The choices, after all, were homosexuality, onanism, or abstinence. Farrell thought almost nobody chose abstinence, and those that did were probably none the better. It was just that Gilmore had a skewed and miserable relation to sex. Like many another prisoner, his natural sexual fantasies must have been burned out long ago by masturbation. No woman could do it as well as one could do it oneself. So his confession wasn't to homosexuality.
It was Gilmore admitting to Nicole how difficult, and pretty, and far-off, and kooky was sex for him.
Farrell decided to break his own rules and insert the letter as part of the bona fide interview. A cheat. So be it. As Schiller had said, "Get down in the gutter with us sinners."
Then he came across something else. From way back in December.
It had been under his nose all the while:
GILMORE All right. (pause) There's a book I would like, but I don't think you can get it in Provo. You might be able to get it in Salt Lake. It's called Show Me. A book of photographs of kids. You think you can get it? It's probably about a $15 book.
INTERVIEWER Yeah, I think we can.
GILMORE I tried to buy it in Provo. It was advertised years and years ago. It may be banned in places like Salt Lake
INTERVIEWER What is it about?
GILMORE About the photographs of children.
INTERVIEWER Why would it be banned?
GILMORE Because it's a sexual book. I read about it off and on for years and I got real curious. They banned it in some parts of Canada and the United States. But they got it in Salt Lake . . .
INTERVIEWER This is an educational book?
GILMORE Well, it's a high line, a real classic. It was made in Germany and all German children and they're really artistic, tasteful, tactful photographs. It's not a piece of smut, but I wanted to see it.
Farrell passed it by and then came back. That little elucidative light one depended upon was flickering again. Yes. Could it be said that Gilmore's love for Nicole oft depended on how childlike she could seem? That elf with knee-length socks, so conveniently shorn-by Gilmore-of her pubic locks. Those hints in the letters of hanky panky with Rosebeth, the rumble with Pete Galovan. Barry nodded. You could about say it added up. There was nobody in of prison whom hardcore convicts despised more than child molesters. The very bottom of the pecking order. What if Gilmore, so soon as he was deprived of Nicole, so soon as he had to live a week without her, began to feel impulses that were wholly unacceptable? What his unendurable tension (of which he had given testimony to every psychiatrist who would listen) had had something to do with little urges? Nothing might have been more intolerable to Gilmore's idea of himself Why, the man would have done anything, even murder, before he'd commit that other kind of transgression. God, it would even account for the awful