Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [105]
I remember that whenever Les Misérables would come on—the 1935 version, with Fredric March and Charles Laughton—my father would make me sit and watch it with him. “Remember this story,” he told me once, after we had witnessed the merciless police inspector Javert hound Jean Valjean for his petty criminal past. “Remember how the world can persecute a man for his simple mistakes, and remember what a horrible thing a pious judge is.”
He would put his arm around me and draw me close to him. In those hours, I felt safe against the world, but I knew from my father’s words that there were hard punishments yet to come.
SOMETIMES WHEN WE WENT out dressed alike, my father would visit what were known as the skid-row parts of town, where transients and heavy drinkers hung out. Today some of these people would be called homeless, but in those days were called bums. In Seattle, which had once been something of a rowdy pioneer and gold rush town, and which still had some fairly hard types working on its docks, the skid-row parts of town were considered rough quarters. My father would visit the area’s missions and its taverns. He would order a short beer and talk to bartenders about their customers. My father knew that broken men could be found in these places, and for one reason or another, these were the men he wanted to have work for him. In part because they would work cheap and were easy to domineer. Also, they probably reminded my father of his own down-and-out times. Often, he would bring these whiskered men to live in the same house with us. He’d buy them clothes—used clothes, of course—and he’d put them to work as telephone salesmen. If they kept their drinking out of our home and never let it affect their work, and if they did not steal from him or become temperamental, he treated them well. But if they abused his trust or became drunk and rowdy, he fired them on the spot. I remember well the two or three times he punched out men who were probably half his age and twice his strength. My father would make a fist and throw it at their stomach. That always disabled them. Then he hit them in the face until they begged him to stop. Then he would throw them and their belongings out the door, give them a few dollars, and warn them: “Never come around us again.”
In those times, when my father visited the bars or taverns, he expected me to take care of myself. He would give me a few dollars and tell me to find a store to shop in or to go catch the bus and find a movie to see. Looking back, I realize I was allowed an amazing amount of movement for a kid. I was free to ride buses to downtown Seattle or the city zoo by age eight, and I was free to stay out until past the hour of darkness. I don’t remember anybody ever threatening or scaring me during these times, and I don’t remember any adult asking me what I was doing out on my own, without a parent or guardian. When I couldn’t find a good bookstore or movie house, I’d spend hours exploring abandoned old houses in the Queen Anne district. It was rumored that if you dug around in the basements of the older dwellings in the area, you would sometimes find passages into an antique underworld—the world left by the awful fire from generations before. All I ever found, though, were dirty ruins and an occasional discarded keepsake.
THE TRUTH IS, I WAS a young boy living with an old man in what was left of an old world. We shopped in old stores, we ate in old diners, we dressed in old suits. It’s as if I were a child dressed up for the 1940s, living on the verge of the 1960s.
All this seemed normal to me—it was the only world I knew. But perhaps on some level I recognized that it wasn’t normal, and maybe this recognition took its toll. Looking back, I now believe I probably experienced some periodic childhood depression—which shouldn’t seem surprising. Once in a